Cortana and Search not working after upgrade

[Clayto2]

Yesterday I had my Tablet PC (Windows 8.1) returned after the upgrade by a technician. I have encountered some issues, some fairly minor, others more significant ---- especially Cortana and Search not working:

1. Cortana does not work. She is said to be unavailable because of the language and region that has been selected. The language is English USA (needed for the keyboard) and the region is UK / GB, surely neither of which should be causing any problems?

2. Search does not work. It generates the error 'class not registered'. I have encountered this error before, so from searching in the past I have seen that this can be caused by a number of different factors, hence it is hard to identify what to do.

I will work on the other issues after these two have been resolved.

I have visited the How To site and found that my situation is commonplace, complicated and worldwide. There are many in a similar situation in the UK. On the one hand it is comforting to know that I am not alone and others have resolved the problems --- eventually. However, on the other hand I note that many of the postings date from July, and feel it should not still be continuing to happen now.

If I have understood it, the problems revolve around getting the settings for region / display language / speech language configured in a mutually compatible way.

Help would be appreciated!

[MrODeath]

Not sure if this will work for you but my friend had a problem like this go into task manager and look for search or it may be called cortana and then end the task it will restart the search and fix the problem.

[Clayto2]

Hi

I tried that. Cortana (not Search) re-appears in Task Manager after ending the task, but it does not affect the problem.  When trying to search I get the error 'class not registered'.

[patio]

Cortana crashed at a major rollout demo last week sponsored by MS...just sayin.

[Clayto2]

I got the issues with Cortana / Search sorted it, she is now giving me UK news, weather and local information.  Language is set to US English, which is hardly a problem despite it being the 'common language' which divides us. 

For a while I was getting 'class not registered' errors with every search via Cortana but (following advice) this was solved by setting my default browser back from Chrome to Edge. (I had been advised to use a different browser to Edge by Norton, on grounds that it does not allow extensions and is not protected.