Severe errors in WSL due to destructive updates on Windows

I absolutely hate this day. As usual, I booted up my laptop, opened VSCode and WSL, only to be greeted by the strange Wsl/ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND error today.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) would always mysteriously stop working, though it could be easily recovered with some reconfiguration, but not this time.

I had both a Debian based WSL1 for native file operations and an Ubuntu 22 based WSL2 for running services in Modular installed, but when I tried to launch them directly with the commands ubuntu and debian, they both started throwing 0x80070002 errors. I attempted fixes from Google and Github to no avail.

Almost every command in wsl.exe was throwing Wsl/ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND exceptions, WSL services kept stopping, and all the reset methods were practically useless.

I tried:

Finally, just uninstalling the two Windows Subsystem for Linux apps from the app list, and reinstalling them from the Microsoft Store got my WSL working again.

The endless stream of terrible bugs from Microsoft keeps amazing me, last time a major error happened, I even had to convert a WSL2 instance to WSL1 and back to WSL2 to fix it. It's unbearable.

🙏🙏🙏

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