Error 0x80070490 when trying to make any purchase on WP7 MarketPlace

author Richard Fennell calendar Dec 10, 2011 · 3 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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Recently I have had a problem with my LG E900 Windows Phone 7 running Mango. Whenever I try to make a purchase on marketplace I was getting the error “There has been a problem completing your request. Try again later” and seeing the error code 0x80070490. A search on the web, asking around everyone I thought might have an answer and placing a question on Microsoft Answers got me no where.

The phone had been working fine until a few days ago. The problem started when I tired to run the Amazon Kindle app (now my primary platform for reading, yes decided not to buy an actual Kindle at this point), this failed to start, it just kept returning to the phone home page. A power cycle of the phone had no effect. I have seen this before and fixed it with a remove and re-install of the app. However, though the remove was fine, whenever I try to reinstall I got the 0x80070490 error.

I tried installing another WP7 application (not a reinstall) but I got the same error.

As this is a development phone I was able to try to deploy an app XAP file I created from my PC. This worked without a problem.

I checked my account in Zune, I could login and see the applications I have purchased in the past, so I suspected the issue was corruption of the local catalogue on the phone, but I had no way to prove it.

At this point I was out of ideas so did a reset to factory settings on the phone. This was a bit of pain as my phone is one of the ones form the PDC last year, which Microsoft sourced in Germany. So it was off to Google Translate to help me through enough German screens to set the language to English.  But on the plus side I have learnt ‘notruf’ is German for ‘emergency call’.

So I had to

  • Sync with Zune to get my data off the phone
  • Factory reset (Settings|About)
  • Set to English
  • Reinstall Apps I had previous purchased
  • Re-Sync with Zune and put back any music, podcasts etc.
  • Set the APN (Setting|Mobile Network) as with Vodafone UK the phone does not seem to pick this automatically
  • Set things like ring tones, screen locks
  • And I am sure there are things I will notice I missed over the next few days…..

So this took about 30 minutes to get my phone back to something like my settings. Not a great owner experience, but we repave our PCs regularly to get ride of the accumulated rubbish, so why not our phones?