A friend has bought a new S&W 22A and is having functioning problems with Winchester ammo. Does anyone have experience with what brand works best with these guns?

I use CCI Mini Mags & they work flawlessly. Nothing else I've tried works as well.

I have 3 of the 22a use cheap bulk ammo in all , the few misfires are ammo problems not the guns fault, but for the price who cares not me.

I use the Winchester Expert V ammo and have misfires but for the price I find it works not all that bad for the price in mine. I have the same problem with other brands as well so why pay more for what is normal in the 22 class.

Tried Federal bulk and some of the cheap stuff. For me, nothing works better than mini mags. That's all I use now.

I had the same problem with Winchester 22 ammo. There were way too many FTF's. I went back to Federal bulk 525. The Federals are much higher quality in this regard.

The thing about .22s is most of the ammo failures with bulk ammo will be ammo related. I have run federal bulk pack, american eagle, remington thunderbolts, and winchester 333 pack through mine. The only gun related failures have been with the winchester 333's which are a hollow point round, it seems that with the mag release location the hollow points want to sometimes hang up on the notch and not feed. My advise would be to avoid the hollow points, once I did that the gun has functioned flawlessly for several thousand rounds.

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Drew

I have the 22s version of this pistol, and the difference is that it's all steel/stainless steel, no aluminum alloy in the gun.

I've recently used up all of my Federal 550 round bulk packs accumulated from the very early 1990s. I remember that seldom, if ever, having a defective rimfire primer charge in any of those older Federal rounds.

With the newer Federal 550 bulk packs, I'm experiencing frequent fail to fire rounds, though most will fire if rotated to allow another strike on the primer rim.
I also had some early 90s bricks of Rem Thunderbolts, and WW wildcats, and occasionally, one of those wouldn't fire either, however, rotating those cartridges in the chamber seemed to remedy the problem as well.

A few years ago, Remington target (blue) ammo that I had just bought at Walmart, ftf about 30% of the time.
In all fairness, Remington picked up (via UPS), the defective rounds and boxes, and they did confirm the rim/primer charges defective, plus, they paid me for the 2 boxes of ammunition. Good outfit they are!

Switching to Federal Gold Medalist target 22 lr ammo, (circa 2002), that pricey stuff was absolutely reliable, as was any CCI rimfire ammunition that I've recently used. Even their promotional Blazer fodder fires every time. Perhaps it's just the luck of the draw.

FWIW: My S&W model 41 duplicates the ftf syndrome with all the above described defective rounds, so for sure it's not an issue with My S&W 22s pistol.

IMO, production quotas seemingly have reduced the quality of much of the current 22LR ammunition offerings.

Just My observations, and .02.

I've also had good luck with the CCI MiniMags. Have put at least 2000 through my 22a with no problems.