Sonos S2 app stuck on “Sonos” splash screen

I came to start the Sonos S2 Windows application today and noticed that it wouldn’t run, it just sticks with the Sonos logo on screen and never actually launches into the application. So I checked the log files under C:\ProgramData\SonosV2,_Inc\runtime and looked at the most recent XML file in there, which should be the last launch log, and I could see the error below in the XML file:

<ApplicationData>@Module:module @Message:Can&apos;t bind (port 3410)</ApplicationData>

This suggests that the Sonos app is trying to open a port and failing, presumably as it’s already reserved for something else. So I checked current excluded ports using the command below and port 3410 that Sonos is trying to grab is already excluded in a range spanning 3390-3489.

netsh int ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp

A little further Googling and I found that this might be related to Hyper-V grabbing ports, possibly more ports than it really needs, and as I use WSL2 on my machine I do have Hyper-V installed. So the solution was to simply disable Hyper-V, reboot, add an exclusion for port 3410 so that Hyper-V can’t grab it, then re-enable Hyper-V, and the code for that is below:

dism.exe /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V
netsh int ipv4 add excludedportrange protocol=tcp startport=3410 numberofports=1
dism.exe /Online /Enable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V

After I’d done this, the Sonos app launches again, and Hyper-V works as expected. Hopefully this helps someone, as I found this problem mentioned in a closed topic on the Sonos forums, but with no solution listed.

Server 2016 & Windows 10 Start Menu Not Working

I’d been having some problems with the start menu in both Server 2016 and Windows 10 stopping working. Googling around revealed various posts and loads of the same advice on how to fix the problem. These included using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool with the /restorehealth switch;

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Reinstalling all modern apps via PowerShell with the following command;

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

Creating a new user account and just using that, not an option if the problem affects all accounts on the machine. The only one of the options mentioned that did help was to re-install Windows, this left the start menu working. However as soon as I domain joined the machine again, it stopped working again after a restart. This led me to look at Group Policy as a potential culprit, and sure enough, moving the object to a separate OU and blocking all policy on it left the start menu working. After a long process of linking policies in one by one I came down to a very specific registry setting.

I’d set the ACLs on a specific registry subkey of HKLM, in this case it was HKLM\Software\Microsoft\RPC. These ACLs were missing one specific entry, namely APPLICATION PACKAGE AUTHORITY\ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES.
Adding this in with only read permissions and forcing a policy update brought the start menu immediately back to life. That ACL is one that has appeared in Server 2012 I think, but since that particular part of our policy predates 2012 that ACL wasn’t there. Oddly enough I’ve not seen this cause any problems with Server 2012/2012 R2/Windows 8/8.1, only with Server 2016 & Windows 10.

So the take away from this is to make sure if you restrict any registry ACLs, make sure you include read access for APPLICATION PACKAGE AUTHORITY\ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES.

If all this was helpful and worked for you, please drop a quick note in the comments.