Windows 10 Start Menu Not functioning

[cheaptonersucks]

Hi,

We are seeing more and more machines where the windows 10 start menu doesn't work. When students click on the start menu nothing happens. It's only affecting the odd random machine at the moment. When we login with the admin account the start menu works just fine. We have only started seeing this in the last couple of weeks, so I wondered if anyone else has experienced this recently?

 

Thanks in advance.

[3s-gtech]

I have seen this in the past where machines were in-place upgraded and any existing profiles broke. Removing the profiles then worked fine.

[Olliedawg]

I've had this before on the odd machine, as above it seemed to be a user profile issue.

 

Either re-image or remove all the local profiles

 

Do you use Applocker? I know if you don't have the default rules set this can break the start menu, among other things

[cheaptonersucks]

Thanks for replying. The machines were all imaged with a couple of years ago with a new install of windows. We haven't seen this issue until the last few weeks. I wondered if it's a windows update as we don't use WSUS any longer.

[cheaptonersucks]

Thanks for the reply Olliedawg. My initial feeling was that it's a profile issue, but it seems to be occurring more regularly. I am deleting their local profiles, but am not sure why it's recently started happening. We never saw this until fairly recently. We don't use Applocker.

[phil0569]

Have you checked the event log. We had similar with the start menu and nothing coming up but had to re-start the file explorer program or log off/back on to get it to work because it was crashing. Only a complete new re-image fixed it sorry to say.

[cheaptonersucks]

Thanks, I am the only tech and am so snowed under that I haven't had time to check the event log yet. I never seem to find anything useful in the event logs, but that might just be me! I have found that nothing apart from re-imaging seems to get the start menu working again. What a piece of work Windows 10 is!! We have had quite a few weird issues with it!

[Bedders]

I've seen this before where there is a permissions issue to an admin user who logged in - every other profile was trying to access something in their AppData. It was in the Application event log on logging in with a user that didn't work. Deleting that admin user's profile resolved the issue, or granting Everyone full access over the file (I think it's a Start Menu Layout file or something).

If you need me to dig out more drop me a PM and I'll take a look when I'm back in the office.

[synaas]

Is the start menu accessible when the "windows icon" button on the keyboard is pressed?

The reason I ask is becasue it's worth identifying if it's an issue with the GUI or the function of the start menu appearing itself, so by pressing the start button on the keyboard we can identify that.

 

Secondly, if an admin account works fine it might be due to it being a different profile - how does it work with another profile with the same permissions?

 

Thirdly, when this happens, have you tried restarting windows explorer.exe via taskmgr to see if something in the background is causing the taskbar to bug out.

 

Hopefully you find the issue

[Olliedawg]

Thanks, I am the only tech and am so snowed under that I haven't had time to check the event log yet. I never seem to find anything useful in the event logs, but that might just be me! I have found that nothing apart from re-imaging seems to get the start menu working again. What a piece of work Windows 10 is!! We have had quite a few weird issues with it!

 

 

I know your struggles, i was on my own in a secondary for nearly two years.

 

I would just re-image the machine honestly, it's far quicker to do that than spend time troubleshooting an issue like this. Especially if you have a MDT / SCCM setup, or some other form of imaging.

[cheaptonersucks]

Thank you all for your advice and suggestions. I am the only technician in a large secondary school, so it's taken me days to even check Edugeek, as I am so busy! I think that I am just going to roll out windows 11 and hope that it's not as annoying as windows 10! I really hope that the profile sizes are not as huge with windows 11, as I have seen massive profile sizes with windows 10, that I never experienced with windows 7! 10 seems to stuff absolutely everything into the profile!

[psydii]

Teams / Chrome / OneDrive and Outlook are all really good at consuming diskspace in user profiles.

We get around this by:

• not installing Teams or outlook on shared devices, instead use the web based versions
  
• Blocking all browsers apart from edge (its chrome under the hood so no compatibility issues there)
  
• Making sure OneDrive files on demand is the default (or not having onedrive fire up at all if its a shared pc with very small drives - there are special Intune profiles for that)
  
• Being quite aggressive with Storage Sense settings and profile clean up.
  

 

 

We have seen a small up-tick in misbehaving start menus recently, but mostly the problem seems to go away after a while. Does feel like an update to something has made it (slightly) less reliable than it has been these last few years.

[cheaptonersucks]

Yes psydii I have seen Year 8 students with 7-10GB profiles since we migrated to windows 10! Microsoft have clearly designed windows 10 so that it stuffs as much as possible inside user profiles! may I ask how you clean up profiles? I have tried various powershell scripts but none of the ones that I have found delete all traces of the local user profile from registry or the user folder on the C drive. Do you or anyone else have a script that does all of that?

[psydii]

This is a good start. https://adamtheautomator.com/powershell-delete-user-profile/

 

There has been shenanigans about how to correctly identify the time a profile was last used, at various points in W10’s life various indicators have been misleading/broken. I can’t remember where we ended up, but when we need to run it were are in a pickle so take a very aggressive stance on profile age.

Edited January 29, 2025 by psydii

[psydii]

…and “all traces” is a bold goal. “Good enough” is what we settled with. We’ve been using a version of that script for 5-6 years and even though sometimes artifacts are left behind, machine performance remains acceptable. One of the most common reasons files get left behind is because they have not been flagged by OneDrive as sync’d back to the cloud. Files in this state are not removed. (Or so it behaved last time I checked about 3 years ago). This is a good thing as it gives recovery options when a student reports some files are missing.

 

 

 

We also have seating plans and per-class laptop laptop assignments. This is officially for behaviour/accountability (as per behaviour policy) but in fact makes the Windows 10/11 default profile/onedrive/app management strategy viable (when paired with aggressive storage sense and that script)

 

I will note that on machine with 512gb disks we never see disk space issues.

 

Other reasons for files to get left behind are them being locked open by an update (windows or app) or AV scanning in progress, or actual corruption. Also naive administrators just deleting files or registry entries have been a common occourance, but sometimes a machine just needs a complete wipe and to start again.

[cheaptonersucks]

Thank you, I will have a look at that script. I saw a Year 7 profile the other day which was 9GB!! This was never an issue with windows 7!