On December 13, 2022, Microsoft released the updates KB5021088 and KB5021090 for Window 10 and Windows 11, correspondingly.  These updates break many applications (including EventIDE) that use XPS documents. The issue is reported here and here. In EventIDE, the issue appears as a critical error, “StoryFragments part failed to load”, that blocks the application start.

The issue affects all EventIDE versions on Windows 10/11.  However,  there are 3 simple solutions that you can apply.

1. Uninstall the the KB5020880 update from the Windows Update Center.

Open Windows Settings and go to Windows Update > Update history –> Uninstall updates. Find the KB5020880 update with an installation date after Dec 13, 2022 and uninstall it.

Then, restart a computer and run EventIDE. The critical error should be gone. The drawback of this solution is that you must track that the same update is not installed automatically again.

2. Apply a Windows Registry patch

The KB5020880 can be disabled in Windows Registry, as it is described here.  To apply the registry patch, run the an elevated command prompt by pressing  Start button and typing  “cmd” in the search box. Run the command prompt by the right mouse click and selecting “Run as administrator”. Then, in the cmd terminal, paste the following command and execute it:

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\Windows Presentation Foundation\XPSAllowedTypes" /v "DisableDec2022Patch" /t REG_SZ /d "*" /reg:64

Finally,  restart EventIDE.  The critical error should be gone.

3. Update EventIDE to the newest version by 19 December 2022

The new version of EventIDE contains an auto-fix for that issue by patching Windows registry.  The apply the auto-fix, you need to run  EventIDE with the administrator privileges once. If it’s not possible EventIDE will work too but the quick tutorial in the Help section will be not available.