Windows 8 start screen and search is broken

Before I start, I have to point out this is not a me too complaint about not liking the new Windows 8 user interface. I have no problems with it. Or at least I didn’t have until it started to look like this, with no icons. If I press the little [–] button at bottom right then small versions of my icons appear and I can then see the full size versions of them if I click somewhere on the screen. But if I want to search for an app, although Windows says there are apps there, nothing appears in the main window. Search results for settings and files do appear however.

 

I have no idea how it got into this state, or why, or how to get my icons and search results back. Since this is, I think, the only way to get to applications, this is kind of frustrating. It seems I now have to search round in Explorer to find the relevant EXE…

Update -  Turns out the fix for this is the old favourite, a reboot…

Windows 8 - The Module DLL C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\rewrite.dll failed to load

After installing Windows 8, one of my AppPools in IIS kept stopping with the error ‘The Module DLL C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\rewrite.dll failed to load’ appearing in my Event Log. Since I’m not really using the IIS URL Rewrite module, I tried removing it from IIS, but this didn’t fix the problem. But uninstalling it via Control Panel did fix the issue. Not sure what the underlying problem was and obviously this isn’t a great solution if you are using the URL Rewrite module, but it worked for me!