One of my Surface Pro 8 thunderbolt ports works only now and then. Is there a utility to fix such a problem? I would appreciate any advice.
I have two Gigabyte Brix NUC PC starting to have some kind of old age sign. The utility I found was… a garbage can… 
I guess that’s not what you wanted to hear, well, if it’s not the cable and it’s not a software problem, there’s Microsoft after-sales… or the garbage can! 
Oh no, he’s going to stop with his garbage! 
Network ports. Sigh. Reminds me of the early days of PC networking before Ethernet connectivity became widely available. Back in the late '80s, we had a little product group network set up with two servers (Bert and Ernie, each with a 20MB (that’s mega, not giga) drive) using the proprietary IBM network cards. One day, our network went down. After a lot a fruitless troubleshooting, I put a voltmeter on the network port, where I found a constant 20VDC level. I then had to disconnect one network card after another to find which one had blown a port, and then replace the offending card. Grrrrrr.
The garbage can - that’s not good.
I found a utility from The Windows Club called FixWin 11.1. I ran the “System File Checker Utility” on the opening page just before I went to bed last night. This morning when I plugged into the offending TB port, it worked! Goodness knows if the utility fixed it or if Windows just changed its mind. Anyway, it’s all good now. BTW - FixWin 11.1 is free.
I would be curious to know what a « System File Checker » utility has to do with a non working Thunderbolt… 
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The front page of the app suggested to do that before anything else.
I guess FixWin runs ‘sfc’.
Sfc is a standard Windows utility. Typical usage sfc /scannow. It verifies all Windows libraries and executables and replaces them with the original ones if necessary. It might have been that one of the libraries was damaged.
Maybe sfc logs its actions in the event logs.
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Interesting, are the original ones stored somewhere or retrieved from Internet?
“The sfc /scannow command will scan all protected system files, and replace corrupted files with a cached copy that is located in a compressed folder at %WinDir% \System32\dllcache.”
Not only Apple has tried to make recovery as good and convenient as possible 
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