Microsoft had to go and reinvent the wheel, and replace good ‘ole calc.exe in Windows 10 since late 2017. I can see why they did it – to make it touch-friendly.

I’ve seen an error that prevents the new calculator app from even loading in the first place. I experienced that error on my own machine after clearing out my Windows profile and logging on fresh:

I can’t work without a calculator app, I use it all the time, so I had to set off and try to find a solution. There are all sorts of involved solutions out there, but what worked for me was as simple as these two lines of PowerShell (run as an admin):

Get-AppxPackage -Name Microsoft.WindowsCalculator | Remove-AppxPackage

and

Get-AppxPackage -Name Microsoft.WindowsCalculator | Add-AppxPackage

After that, my calculator app started working again:

Note: This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a year, waiting for an additional screenshot. I decided to publish it today, but there may now be better solutions to this problem.