Quick Assist does not load on main user profile

tgp1994 96

I do remote support for people, and in the past I've used Team Viewer. I just learned about Quick Assist, and would like to try it.

I first had to enable it as an optional feature since it was not for some reason. After that was done, I tried launching it, and am greeted with a white screen and spinning blue dots. The app sits here and never finishes loading.

I've tried selective startup with System Services only, and resetting Internet Explorer settings to defaults, neither of those options have worked. I did try making another user account on my PC which did work, however this isn't ideal and I'd like to understand why it isn't working on mine without having to do any sort of destructive resets.

I tried watching the process in Process Monitor, and it seems to get stuck directly after sending and receiving some data to a remote IP address. If there are any ideas on how I can troubleshoot this, I'd really appreciate it!

Current system: 20H2 Build 19042.985

References

Andy YOU 3,066 Reputation points

2021-06-04T02:00:24.913+00:00

HI
This is a quick note to let you know that I am currently performing research on this issue and will get back to you as soon as possible. I appreciate your patience.
If you have any updates during this process, please feel free to let me know.
tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-06-04T02:24:35.993+00:00

Thank you!
Andy YOU 3,066 Reputation points

2021-06-04T04:47:11.427+00:00

HI tgp1994-1882,

"After that was done, I tried launching it, and am greeted with a white screen and spinning blue dots."
1.When this symptom happen?
after you click “assist another person” option like below picture?
after you just click "quick assist" in start menu?

2."white screen and spinning blue dots"
Is the symptom like below picture?

3.Did your current issue account in local administrators group of problematical win10?

4.Is current local issue computer and remote computer joined to the same AD domain?
tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-06-04T04:52:00.083+00:00

1.When this symptom happen?

After opening the app, and a brief blue screen with spinning white dots. I'm not able to get the app to load at all.

Is the symptom like below picture?

Something like that. The spinning dots on my end have a fancier look that goes along with the more modern design style, maybe the screenshot here is a little older.

3.Did your current issue account in local administrators group of problematical win10?

The current issue occurs in an account that belongs to the Local Administrators. When I created a new Standard User, that one works ok.

4.Is current local issue computer and remote computer joined to the same AD domain?

Active Directory is not deployed in my network.
Roy Beaulieu 21 Reputation points

2021-08-04T04:26:11.263+00:00

I'm working this very issue with Quick Assist and security for internet zones. I've collected a list of sites to place in the Trusted sites list so scripts (guessing JavaScript) can be permitted. However, there is some script running (maybe locally?) that's still producing a dialog box to allow scripts to run.

What I've learned is, if you adjust your Internet zone to high, this disables scripts. For testing, I've used the Custom level... button to change scripts (7th from the bottom) to either allow or prompt. If allowed, it just works. If prompt, I get the box as expected and if I say yes, Quick Assist works.

HOWEVER! I've done as much scouring with GlassWire and ipconfig /displaydns as I can to reveal sites Quick Assist needs to run scripts for so they can be added to the list of Trusted sites where scripts are just allowed. I still get 1 script prompt when QA is launched to receive assistance and 6 more if I sign in to provide assistance totaling 7 prompts. Without these sites in Trusted, I can't even remember how many prompts I get but, IT'S A LOT! I can't for the life of me track down whatever it takes to make them all stop.
My list:
*.akadns.net
*.akamaiedge.net
*.akamaitechnologies.com
*.azure-api.net
*.azureedge.net
*.edgekey.net
*.gammacdn.net
*.live.com
*.lync.com
*.microsoft.com
*.microsoftonline.com
*.msauth.net
*.msecdn.net
*.msidentity.com
*.nsatc.net
*.onestore.ms
*.trafficmanager.net
tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-08-04T18:01:03.043+00:00

Roy,

Thank you for posting that! My Internet zone defaults to medium-high, and when I checked the specific configuration items, all script options were set to either enabled or prompt. I tried going through the list and setting everything else to enabled or prompt, and later I just lowered the internet zone to it's lowest security level, "medium". Unfortunately none of these things changed the behavior of Quick Assist. It does look like, in my case, that there's something wrong with my user profile.
Roy Beaulieu 21 Reputation points

2021-08-04T18:06:12.97+00:00

Do you have any sites in the Restricted sites list? If QA can't contact some of the sites I posted, you'll get this behavior. Also, many of these settings are Windows profile specific so another profile might not have the setting that's breaking QA.
tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-08-04T18:07:20.24+00:00

No, nothing in restricted. I've reset my Internet Properties recently too, so that part should at least be as close to default as possible.
Roy Beaulieu 21 Reputation points

2021-08-04T18:38:01.737+00:00

OK. Just so you know, resetting the properties doesn't change sites the registry dumps in there. It only changes the radio options selected. Sites in the zones list are unaffected by the reset.
Roy Beaulieu 21 Reputation points

2021-08-04T18:46:15.667+00:00

Maybe see if you can ping all the domains in that list for the broken profile?
tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-08-04T19:10:03.297+00:00

Good point about the site lists. I actually had to wipe some from my registry because I couldn't remove them myself from the Internet Properties window. Otherwise I just double checked that they're both empty.

Also great idea about pinging the names. I couldn't get most of them to resolve though, I think I might need a list of individual hosts that it attempts to contact. I capture the process operation and did a comparison of a good result vs. bad result in some other posts I made in this topic. I'm trying to find where it is but I'm not seeing it. To summarize, during a bad start, QA would try to reach out to a few different IPs over TCP then give up. I verified that they were reachable, so it almost seemed like there was something on my end confusing QA. Still a mystery to me - I've been pouring over the capture logs from ProcMon trying to figure out what's triggering this bug, but nothing has really jumped out at me. I can see QA querying different registry keys in my hive, but for the most part the results seem to be identical to the good profile. I wish I had access to the source of QA, unfortunately it looks like it's built in C/C++ so my usual .Net reverse engineering won't work here.
KH 1 Reputation point

2022-01-13T19:15:48.893+00:00

]1

Accepted answer

tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-10-09T21:05:14.683+00:00

I want to just post an update here. At some point, the Quick Assist app has started working. I can't see any program versions so I don't know when it changed, but at any rate I can now use it on my main user account. Thank you @Andy YOU for all of your help!
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9 additional answers

Andy YOU 3,066 Reputation points

2021-06-07T08:23:40.403+00:00

HI tgp1994-1882,

Thanks for your reply.

1.Please clean boot your problematical win10 then check if the same issue happen?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

2.If the same issue happen on clean boot mode for issue account, please compare which difference between normal logs and issue logs.
(1)Please download network monitor/wireshark and procmon on your problematical computer.
(2)Use problematical admin account logon this computer, run both network monitor/wireshark and procmon first then open the quick assist to reprocuce your issue, then stop and catpure issue network log and issue procmon log.
(3)Use normal administrator account logon this computer, run both network monitor/wireshark and procmon first then open the quick assist to reprocuce your issue again, then stop and catpure normal network log and normal procmon log.
(4)Compare which difference between normal logs and issue logs.

3.When the quick assistance open fail, we can write down the time and check if there is any log about our issue?

client win10
event viewer\windows logs\
application
setup
system
Event Viewer – Applications and Services Logs -Microsoft-remoteassistance
admin enable
operational enable
tracing enable

Download Wireshark
https://www.wireshark.org/download.html

Process Monitor v3.82
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

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tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-06-09T00:09:55.54+00:00

Hi,

Clean boot was already attempted, no difference.

Wireshark was a more difficult one to compare because we can't filter per application. If I look at both Wireshark and Process Monitor logs though, I can start to see a pattern:

Both sessions (good start and bad start) make connections to five different IPs. In the bad start, two IPs are communicated with slightly less than a good start, while the remaining three are communicated with much more (twice as much in one case). Wireshark isn't much more informative unfortunately, since you can't filter by process. I'm also not sure how to view the information in a TLS session unless you know how.

I've hit my character limit for this post, so I'll make another with observations comparing the two process monitor captures.

tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-06-09T00:19:52.957+00:00

When I look at a side-by-side difference of the two entire ProcMon captures, I can sort of see an interesting pattern. Here's an image of the differences in process activity - good on the left, bad on the right.

You can see that it's mostly the same until about one third of the way, then the good and bad executions diverge. Just before this occurs, the program is querying some Internet Explorer/Windows Explorer registry keys but getting back the same data for the most part. Unfortunately I can't really see what else to glean from this information.

Looking through the Application, Setup, System, and Remoteassistance event logs doesn't show anything relating to me using Quick Assist.
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Reza-Ameri 16,826 Reputation points

2021-06-06T14:12:31.403+00:00

Try open start and search for feedback and open the Feedback Hub app and report this issue.
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tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-06-06T15:27:18.573+00:00

Already done, hopefully that will help. I noticed that you can't collect diagnostic logs anymore, so unfortunately those won't be included.

Reza-Ameri 16,826 Reputation points

2021-06-07T15:24:05.52+00:00

Glad you did, this way the Windows team would be able to investigate and resolve the problem.
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S.Sengupta 14,886 Reputation points MVP

2021-06-09T00:35:59.017+00:00

What I understand that you have to Reset your system - without losing anything other than all installed Windows Updates.
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tgp1994 96 Reputation points

2021-06-09T00:41:13.12+00:00

Before I go and do that, I wonder how this would solve a problem that's isolated to my user?
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Andy YOU 3,066 Reputation points

2021-06-09T04:25:27.85+00:00

HI tgp1994-1882,

Sorry, I can't see this picture clearly.
If we use network monitor and follow my step 2, will it find the key thread?
Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4 (archive)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4865

If we still can not find the key thread, please do below steps:
(1)backup the issue account profile data (include desktop file, Favorites etc) to another disk.
(2)delete the issue account and delete his profile registry key
(3)reboot the computer and create a new account with the same name for this issue user
(4)copy the original data of issue account to new account' folder.

How To Delete User Profile in Windows 10
https://winaero.com/delete-user-profile-windows-10/

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