On October 29 the start button and the Windows 10 taskbar stopped working. I have called Microsoft tech support and chatted online five times but they have not been able to resolve the problem. Windows 10 worked alright for over a month, but then this problem occurred. I believe there was a Windows 10 update around that time. I have Norton Security Suite from Xfinity which I hear sometimes causes problems. Has anyone else encountered this problem and found a solution?
Start Button Stopped Working
- Thread starter Badboy
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Same thing has happened to me today (13 Nov 2015). Windows 10 has worked ok up untill now, but on start up today the windows start button (bottom left corner) is unresponsive, Task manager shows lots of activity for the last 45 minutes! Cannot use Edge etc although Chrome etc can be accessed form Icons.
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Hi,I installed windows 10 a month ago. Worked fine. Since yesterday, the start menu will not work, the whole PC system is instable. I have tried as many solutions as I could find in various forums, including the Microsoft ones. To no avail. Now my desktop is slow, some of the Windows 10 features are not working or I get silly messages such as a given program is not available. I intended to go back to win7. Any one has tried it successfully? Please help. Many thanks.
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Very curious problem.
One that I have no personal experience with, but......
I'm wondering, have you tried booting your machine into Safe Mode, just to see if the problem persists?
https://www.windows10forums.com/articles/safe-mode.3/
Since you cannot use the left click to bring up the normal power button options to restart, perhaps try either a right click on it or use the Power Button (bottom right corner) of the screen after using Ctrl + Alt + Delete
Any power / restart should work, as long as you hold the Shift Key, when choosing Restart.
One that I have no personal experience with, but......
I'm wondering, have you tried booting your machine into Safe Mode, just to see if the problem persists?
https://www.windows10forums.com/articles/safe-mode.3/
Since you cannot use the left click to bring up the normal power button options to restart, perhaps try either a right click on it or use the Power Button (bottom right corner) of the screen after using Ctrl + Alt + Delete
Any power / restart should work, as long as you hold the Shift Key, when choosing Restart.
Microsoft tech people have remotely accessed my computer on three occasions and have not been able to resolve this problem, including shutting down all nonessential programs at start and restarting the computer. The last tech person said I should call their phone support number rather than the online chat to get advanced support, but already two of my attempts were by phone to fix this. One of them quit on me because I asked twice whether they could reinstall Windows 10 on my computer. Maybe I should contact Dell support and ask them to reinstall Windows 8 which is what I had when I bought the computer. They did try to get me to pay for advanced help from Microsoft, but this seems like a basic problem.
Thanks Trouble Noob Whisperer. Tried Safe Mode but no success. I remembered when I first updated to W10 from W7 , the update kept trying over several weeks (and used a lot of Broadband) but kept aborting. I then tried the upgrade from an administrative account and it worked. So thought I would sign on as an administrator and my troubles immediately seemed to be over, I had the start button, could get Apps and Edge, etc. However when I went back to my standard account there was no improvement. I could of course start a new standard account, which might work, but would I lose data?
Lengthy attempt to solve the problem today. I still had the old Windows version. Update history showed that an update had failed. Managed to start the update from my Admin Account , having disabled my anti virus. All seemed to go through ok and at the end I had the new version (10586.3). However, although all was ok for my admin account and for a new temp basic account, my normal basic account still had an inoperable start button,and no access directly to Apps , Edge etc. Something is obviously corrupted in my own log in account. We have had several power cuts lately and one may have happend in the middle of an update. Perhaps this is the problem. I will now try to find a way of getting all my private data to a new account. Sorry my problems have not produced an answer which may have helped Badboy, the original enquirer, or any others.
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We've seen a bit of this type of user profile account corruption. You'll need to copy over the contents of your old profile into a new one. The process is pretty straight forward
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-corrupted-user-profile#1TC=windows-7
The steps are the same as described above, the caveat is that you can not be logged in as either the user you are copying from or too, you need to have a third Admin Account to use for the process.
It actually helps if all three accounts are Admin users during the process to insure that everything works after the process is completed, at which point if you want to revert them to Standard User accounts you can.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-corrupted-user-profile#1TC=windows-7
The steps are the same as described above, the caveat is that you can not be logged in as either the user you are copying from or too, you need to have a third Admin Account to use for the process.
It actually helps if all three accounts are Admin users during the process to insure that everything works after the process is completed, at which point if you want to revert them to Standard User accounts you can.
I too experienced several power cuts when the problem occurred with Windows 10, and near the time of the late October update. I think you my be on to something in that regard. Perhaps I will try your solution of a new administrator account to see if that solves the problem.