Windows 10 Start Menu - I've swallowed the pill

[msi]

This has been covered elsewhere no doubt, but thought I'd share the following.

 

I've spent many weeks reading about the Windows 10 Start Menu. I was a big fan of customising the Start Tiles on Win8.1 and was looking forward to the possibility of GPO configuration of Start Menu and Tiles in Win10, alas this isn't possible in the way that I'd like. Quite a lot more is possible with Education and Enterprise editions, sadly most of the schools I work with didn't purchase these editions.

 

1/ I've played a lot with customising the Win10 Start Menu, tiles, redirection, GPO lockdown, etc. In a few schools everything I've done has worked, it's stable, and everything is good. In a few other schools I've seen a lot of issues which, to be honest, have been very difficult to pin-down. They include;

 

a) "File Explorer" not showing on the Start Menu. Some reports that this was due to an Anniversary Edition update. However I've seen evidence to the contrary myself

 

b) Start menu not showing the contents of registry key UserShellFolders AND / OR not showing contents of C:\ProgramData\...\Start Menu. (Note I say "AND / OR". I mean this in the most accurate sense of the phrase. In some cases I've seen both, in others I've seen one, in others I've seen the other.) - yes, in the worst case scenario which I banged my head against a desk throughout most of yesterday, Start Menu was not even showing things like Microsoft Office. This was for any user, admin or not, before joining to domain and after.

 

c) Start menu corruptions, i.e. works fine for a given user for a number of weeks, no GPO or other configuration changes made, one day randomly user clicks the start menu and it does not appear, requiring blatting the user account. I've seen / tested this on both pre-anniversary and post-anniversary update machines.

 

There's a whole load of "evidence" online in the form of articles on websites like howtogeek, reddit, etc., that purport to help you "solve all your Windows 10 start menu problems". Two things to note here: (1) none of them actually identify the problem properly, they just give "catch all" solutions like "turn off Cortana", "repair corrupt windows files", "sfc \scannow", etc., therefore none of them actually resolve most of the issues I've seen, (2) surely the very fact of these numerous articles indicates that "lots of people are having lots of problems" (not a technical point, but an interesting one).

 

2) I absolutely abhor using 3rd party modifications to the core user experience set out by a given OS. When I first read about Classic Shell, I avoided it like the plague. I'm a sysadmin, there's no way I'm going to let these numerous issues past me, I'm going to do the investigation and the deeper problem solving myself. I'm not going to introduce a workaround in the form of 3rd party software.

 

3) Despite the above, I've had days where my frustration has been so great - not a technical frustration, not the kind where you wrangle with Microsoft Exchange 2007 database files for 24 hours on the trot, no - the kind of frustrations best summarised as follows: IT'S. SIMPLY. BROKEN. - my frustrations have been so great that I've sworn blind I'm going to push to convert all my schools to Google and completely rid them of any Windows machines.

 

Ok, enough hyperbole.

 

I swallowed the damned pill, deployed Classic Shell by GPO, including GPO customisations, and haven't looked back.

 

Yes, I feel dirty. Sometimes I can't sleep at night*. But as a sysadmin my life is about 100 times more simple.

 

 

(* ok I'm joking a bit)

Edited December 23, 2016 by msi

[sparkeh]

With the win 10 start menu I think it's justified to deploy classic start. I'm my opinion CS is what the native menu should have been. Don't sweat it

[newpersn]

Classic Shell all the way...

 

I got one room trailing it currently and once i'm happy i will deploy it round the school.

 

With the normal start menu on windows 10. i never got it to work. Works fine for pupils but not for staff.

[Sheridan]

I pretty much came to the same conclusion. Since 8 the start menu is a broken mess, and I hate using third party tools to replace what should be a part of the default system but ms can't be bothered to fix it so it's either classic start menu or we stick with 7 until a working version comes out.

 

So far classic start has been pretty reliable, more than I can say for other parts of 10!