Unable to activate Windows Store app. The activation request failed with error 'Access is denied'

Question

UWP program that used to work fine does not want to start. When starting the app from Visual Studio 2017 the error message is:

Unable to activate Windows Store app '{guid-name}'. The activation request failed with error 'Access is denied'.

Windows Event Viewer displays the following error:

Activation for {guid-name} failed. Error code: Access is denied.. Activation phase: COM ActivateExtension

The app deploys successfully, but then trying to start it (with or without debugging) it fails. When trying to start from Start menu, nothing happens when I click the app icon, but when trying to start from Visual Studio it produces an error message box. How to find out what is actually wrong?

I have tried the following:

• Rebooting computer
• Clean solution
• Uninstall the deployed app
• Delete bin folder
• Compile with .NET Native toolchain
• The solution is on C: drive
• Change package name
• Change to release profile and back to debug

When I try to create a new UWP app, it works fine, so this is most likely solution-specific error, not something wrong in the computer itself.

Answer 1

I had a similar error message to this, but my error was that a Nuget package had a different package version to my App.

• "App" had dependency "B" version .14
• Dependency "A" had dependency "B" version .13

i don't think this will solve this particular issue but it solved mine and i couldn't find solution to this anywhere.

Answer 2

I had the same problem when creating a blank Xamarin.Forms app targeting UWP. The solution was to create an exception for my app in F-Sscure which would otherwise block it.

Answer 3

Usually this happens when there is an App with the same GUID as the one you are trying to Install/Debug. I would try to find the existing App, uninstall it, and try to deploy/debug again.