Hey everyone, I work for a small managed service provider in the UK, and we've been facing a frustrating issue with PowerShell crashing on several servers and VMs over the past few months. When we try to open PowerShell, it throws an error related to PSReadLine and shuts down. This makes it tough to manage our servers since we rely on PowerShell for tasks like Server Manager, installing updates, and more.
We've tried reinstalling PowerShell, disabling and re-enabling it, running SFC and DISM checks, but nothing seems to work. In fact, we've ended up having to rebuild around 10-12 servers, transferring old files back across. We haven't found anyone else online experiencing this at such a scale. Is this a wide issue that's gone unnoticed, or could we be doing something that's causing this? Any insights or solutions would be greatly appreciated!
5 Answers
If you haven't already, enabling PowerShell session logging could help identify any underlying issues like a broken profile. Additionally, trying to capture the full error message might give you more clarity on what's happening since what you've shared seems a bit vague.
Have you checked your PowerShell profile on the affected machines? Sometimes a corrupted profile can cause issues. You might also try launching PowerShell without any profile via CMD or RUN to see if that changes anything.
We haven't set up any custom profiles; they're just the standard ones. Unfortunately, running it from CMD or RUN gives us the same error. Here's the exact message we keep getting:
"Cannot load PSReadline module. Console is running without PSReadline."
Also, check for the PSReadLine module in C:Program FilesWindowsPowerShellModules. If it's there, you could try removing or replacing the module with one from a working server to see if that helps.
I found the folder there. I tried removing it and copying it from another server, but the same error popped up. Thanks for the suggestion though!
Consider checking for any extra configurations in your $PROFILE. You could open it in Notepad to see if there's anything unusual. The standard path to view it would be:
%USERPROFILE%DocumentsWindowsPowerShellMicrosoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.
I set specific parameters for my PSReadLine to avoid errors. Perhaps that might help you too!
No files there; the server accounts are pretty much default. I might try setting up a custom profile if I can do it without PowerShell.
Is there any endpoint detection and response (EDR) software running? That could interfere with PowerShell’s functionality. Just a thought!
Not that I'm aware of. Some servers are Domain Controllers and only run basic Windows software.
Thanks! I looked into that. Here's the full error:
"One or more errors occurred. Cannot load PSReadline module. Console is running without PSReadline."
I checked Event Viewer too, but I couldn't find anything that explains the errors.