FIX: Error 0x800736B3 installing .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows

A fair share of all the PC games out there that are compatible with Windows 10 requires users to have .NET Framework 3.5 installed on their computers in order for the games to even start up. Installing .NET Framework 3.5 on a computer running on Windows 10 is pretty simple – all you need to do is download the installer for .NET Framework 3.5 from here and then actually install it on your computer.

However, there are a lot of things that can go wrong while trying to install .NET Framework 3.5 on a Windows 10 computer, one of these things being error 0x800736B3. This error is accompanied by the following error message:

“The referenced assembly is not installed on your system.”

Thankfully, this issue is entirely fixable, and there are a couple of ways you can resolve this issue and successfully install .NET Framework 3.5 on a Windows 10 computer. First and foremost, before resorting to any drastic measures, you can repair your computer’s component store and then try installing .NET Framework 3.5 all over again. To repair your computer’s component store, you need to:

Right-click on the Start Menu button to open the WinX Menu

Click on Command Prompt (Admin) in the WinX Menu.

Type the following into the elevated Command Prompt and press Enter:

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

Once the previous command has been successfully executed, type the following into the elevated Command Prompt and then press Enter:

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

As soon as both commands have been executed, close the elevated Command Prompt.

Try installing .NET Framework once more and see whether or not the issue still persists.

If repairing your computer’s component store doesn’t do the trick, don’t worry as you can still fix this problem – you can do so by installing .NET Framework 3.5 on your computer through a Windows 10 installation media. In order to do so, you are going to have to:

Insert a Windows 10 installation media into your computer or mount a Windows 10 ISO onto a virtual drive in your computer. Make sure that the Windows 10 installation media or ISO you use matches the version of Windows 10 that you have on your computer, meaning that if your computer is running on a 32-bit version of Windows 10, be sure to use an installation media or ISO of the same kind.

Launch an elevated Command Prompt by right-clicking on the Start Menu to open the WinX Menu and then clicking on Command Prompt (Admin).

Type the following command into the elevated Command Prompt, replacing the X in the command-line with the drive letter assigned to the drive on your computer that is housing the Windows 10 installation media or ISO that you want to use to fix this problem:

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /Source:X:\sources\sxs /all /LimitAccess

Press Enter.

Wait for the command-line to be fully executed, and once it has, .NET Framework 3.5 will have been successfully installed on your computer.