Start Menu

[Jo B Taylor]

My start menu stopped working several weeks ago and I have been trying all the suggestions found of the various forums with the exception of reloading Windows 10. It looks like Microsoft should be responsible for publishing a solution to this problem realizing how many people are having the same trouble. Anyone have a universal fix?

 

[Trouble]

Anyone have a universal fix?

Nope, and.....

reloading Windows 10

Might not even be a "universal fix".
Do you have other accounts on the system? Does the Start Menu work, using any of the other profiles?

 

[Jo B Taylor]

Nope, and.....

Might not even be a "universal fix".
Do you have other accounts on the system? Does the Start Menu work, using any of the other profiles?

Yes and on one it works about half way. No icon list.

 

[Trouble]

Yes and on one it works about half way. No icon list.

That is not the typical experience we have seen with respect to this particular problem.
Typically we have seen one profile impacted (usually what might be consider the "primary" profile), the one most often used, while other profiles appear to be un-affected by the problem.

I think I would probably still try creating a new user account as a member of the local administrators group, (not a standard user) and test to see if the problems persist with a new user profile just to confirm that it is not profile related but a more global problem, possibly indicating corrupt system files.

 

[Jo B Taylor]

Tried new accounts several times and the start menu doesn't work with them either. The account it somewhat works on is a guest account I created shortly after up-grading to 10 when everything was working.

 

[Trouble]

I assume you have already ran the native System File Checker to see if it might find and resolve any issues with system files??
At this stage of the game
You may want to attempt an in-place upgrade / repair install. Upgrading Windows 10 by installing it over top of itself.
There is a pretty good article here https://neosmart.net/wiki/windows-10-repair-installation/ just ignore the first couple paragraphs where they are promoting their repair products and scroll down to the meat of the article.

If you do not have the installation media....
The installation media can be obtain through either of these two resources.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/techbench
OR
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
Once you have the ISO, you can use ImgBurn to burn it to a DVD or Rufus to burn it to a USB ThumbDrive, or simply mount the ISO from within Windows 10 and run setup.exe from there.
Choose upgrade and make sure the box is ticked to obtain updates as part of the upgrade process.

This is a relatively simple and straight forward task and is generally non-destructive (all your data, programs, drivers, etc., should remain intact and unharmed), but.....
Personally I would still have a backup of my critical data, as well as a disk image, so I could recover in the event of some unforeseen problem.