As you likely have found the Group Policy to disable the store (see below) only works with Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise , and Windows 10 Enterprise and Education. This means it does NOT work on Windows 10 Pro, which is super annoying.
USER CONFIGURATION > ADMINISTRATIVE TEMPLATES > WINDOWS COMPONENTS > STORE > TURN OFF THE STORE APPLICATION
The insane suggestion I had received from Microsoft Partner Support a few months ago was to “simply” delete the STORE application files from every profile on every PC and then hope that Microsoft does not update the STORE in the future, which would reinstall it under a slightly different path.
After MANY hours of banging on this problem I found a simple GPO to will stop the STORE. Software Restriction Policies has worked well:
COMPUTER CONFIGURATION > POLICIES > WINDOWS SETTINGS > SECRURITY SETTINGS > SOFTWARE RESTRICTION POLICIES >
At this point you will likely have to right click and select NEW or CREATE to populate this GPO.
> ADDITIONAL RULES > right click and create a rule that disallows %programfiles%\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore*
It is VERY important to use the ‘*’ wildcard in this path because Microsoft will change the path as they update the STORE application over the coming years.
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If you want an exception to this create a separate AD container with a new SRP, using the specific folder name as unrestricted. You can't unrestrict using wildcards(*).
In my instance the unrestrict policy is for:
%programfiles%\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11602.1.26.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
This will obviously change as the store version is updated. You can find the current version by typing in powershell:
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.WindowsStore*
Thank you very much, it's safe me to disabled the store for windows 10 pro. can i reblog this? and of course I will give the source of the article.
Sure. If you can provide a link back to my site then you can reblog it.
Have a good one :)
Does this actually stop things like store downloading updates? We've had a problem where a few updates go into a recurring loop and download 50gb/day for no result possibly due to some sort of compatibility with a web proxy like this MS technet post: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e9531028-4bfe-40c0-af5c-8873c42b6bae/massive-download?forum=win10itprogeneral
That is an excellent question and I think the answer is yes. I have not tested this but from my experience the updates only come down when the STORE is running sooooo unless I missed something, this should kill the updates.