ArthurDent

Thanks MrBios. Perfect solution.

It happened with all users so profile size was not a factor e.g. my test user has a 2Mb profile.

I had this issue with Windows 10 Education using roaming profiles. It didn't happen in v 1511 (build 10586), it started when we upgraded to v 1607 (build 14393). I lived with it and then when I installed v1703 (build 15063) it went away.

So, here's the rub. I have two identical machines installed with W10 Edu - same version level (no upgrades installed yet). One is a clean install from the DVD. One is an upgrade from 8.1 using the same DVD. They are both in the same OU. On the upgrade machine the user gets the Start Screen. On the clean install machine he doesn't. Any more ideas or experiences? I'm off for Xmas now - back on the 5th Jan but I'll have an occasional peek here if my state of mind allows! Merry Christmas everyone!

Having read and re-read the posts and referred articles by ITGURU and Arthur (no relation) from Dec last year I must come to the conclusion that W10 Ent and W10 Edu work differently. We have Start Menu re-directed in the old way to a network share - it's been like that since folder redirection was invented, and the entries in the All Apps start menu which were used to pin the Start Screen tiles are shortcuts from there (at least THAT still works!). The articles all state that the All Apps "database" is populated at boot-up, from the "$allusersprofile%" path and the user's %appdata% profile path, but how can this be true as at that time the system doesn't know which user will log on (especially on a network, but even with multiple local users), and %appdata% will not be set. I'm not convinced. In any case, we find it is taking shortcuts from the re-directed start menu folder in Ent but not in Edu. So ... I copied the shortcuts from the network share into %alluserprofile%\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs and pinned some to Start Screen (the targets of the shortcuts are in the PC's Program Files). Still nothing shows for a Teacher user (which has a policy with "Remove common program groups from Start Menu" disabled). I then thought I'd start from first principles. Logged on as a local admin I see the "Default" Start Scren which consists of as-supplied tiles for e.g. Edge, Photos, Calendar etc. but no installed programs. I exported that Start Screen. Breakthrough? - that shows the as-supplied tiles for a Teacher user. Hooray - progress I thought. Then, back as the local Admin, I pinned some programs that appear in the All Apps list to the default Start Screen, but they DON'T appear for the Teacher. I added a tile for Calculator and that did show up. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. Just as an aside, although we have the Start Screen XML files on the DC sysvol, I have tried it with the file on the PC's C: with the same results, and yes, I have also tried deleting the user's roaming profile (and we delete cached copies of roaming profiles from the PCs after logoff). Conclusion so far - Microsoft don't want you to be able to pin any installed programs to a common Start Screen. I really can't understand how anybody has got this to work. Please somebody prove me wrong?

Thats OK I'm a real hoopy frood and I know where my towel is at.

I'm new here and I see no news on this topic since August. We are now upgrading Windows 8.1 machines to 10 (Ver reports 10.0.10586) and we have some issues with Start Screen layout which are baffling us. As our 8.1 PCs are Enterprise version, the first few upgrades we did were to 10 Enterprise (logical we thought!) but found some problems with Language settings and some Apps missing that we discovered are OK in Edu so we changed over. We kept one Ent machine in the cave just in case of whatever. As we will have a mix of Win8 and Win10 on the network for a while we encountered the first problem in that you can only have one "Start Layout File" GPO entry and the XML files for 8 and 10 are incompatible. We assign Start Screen by user not computer (one for teachers and one for pupils) so although we have the Win 8 machines and the Win 10 machines in different OUs, we can't put the entry in a policy linked to them. It has to be linked to the Users' OUs. To get round this we set a system environment variable (%WinVer%) to 8 or 10 using the Registry key setting in Preferences in Computer OU linked GPOs (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment\ if anyone's interested), and put %WinVer% in the GPO Start Screen entry filename - e.g. \\...path...\Teacher%WinVer%.xml. The files are in a folder in sysvol so we have: Teacher10.xml, Teacher8.xml and the same for Pupil. This works a treat with Win8.1 and Win10 ENTERPRISE and we know the %WinVer% is being correctly resolved but it doesn't work on the Win 10 EDUCATION PCs - we just get a grey empty box, even on the same computer used to generate the XML file. The XML files were exported from the 10 Edu machine and we have tried it both with and without the line "" that some forums say to remove. Sorry about the long winded preamble, but as I'm going to ask if anyone can help I thought it would be useful to answer the expected questions before they were asked. So, can anyone offer any words of wisdom please?

Hi I have been in "IT" since 1974. We used to call it "computers". I now have more processing power on my wrist than we had in a room the size of two average classrooms. As you can guess, I'm getting on a bit. After a career in the software industry, I gave up latterly being the IT manager of a well known independant boarding school in 2009 and now do a consulting work at local schools both public and private around Wokingham and Bracknell. I have a wealth of accumulated kowledge but still need to resort to places like this every time Microsoft release a new set of "updates" which fix something that wasn't broken. I will be posting soon on issues with Windows 10 Education version.