Windows 10 Start Menu, metro apps, and taskbar icons not working

Night Hawk · 13 Aug 2015

They generally don't merge threads. myself Sorry! If the 10 download was saved to the drive in ISO image form you can double click and mount the image as a new virtual dvd drive and browse to the "sources" folder in order to extract a fresh copy of the install.wim file.

You can try anything actually but as I was saying you will likely end up either trying the System Restore in order to back track out of the update where the problem came up and then still attempt an upgrade to repair install just to keep 10 going the way it is or perform the actual problem solver of seeing to a fresh clean install which will solve a great number of other potential could come up issues.

At first that may seem like a real pain but in the long run it can make life quite a bit easier then fending off one headache after another that can pop up out of nowhere!

myself · 13 Aug 2015

nighthawk, ty for your ideas and tips!

finally my "solution" was to create a new (AD)user. that works w/o problems.
A clean install wasn't really an option in my case.

I was playing arounf with the user's AppData folders a bit, trying to cop the working users data over the faultyone, but wthout success in the first place - and since this is a companys machine im working with, i just enjoy 10 now and leave it for good (-:

bst.regards, me (-:

Night Hawk · 13 Aug 2015

Well you can only do so much with a company machine! A clean install now would have to be upto the management there.

Still glad to see you were able to find something that works at least for the time being anyways.

DaveGrant01 · 24 Nov 2015

myself said:

i found another method, which did not work for me, but it may be worth a try for smbdy of you too:

taskbar, start menu, cortana not working in Windows 10 (FIX)

Somebody made a little .bat file with all the steps integrated.

-Great, thanks for this link, this .bat fix totally fixed for me!!

-later . . .

OK, the .bat file referred to above worked for me the first time this happened, but not today.
But digging again I found something that did the trick for me, and is so easy if you are having this problem-

1. Go to the desktop, right click anywhere, hover your mouse over new and then click shortcut
2. When you are making a shortcut it will ask you to type a location. type in "msconfig", click next and then it will ask you what you want to name the shortcut name it anything you want it's not important.
3 . A shortcut for msconfig will show up double click it and click on the boot tab at the top. Once in the boot tab enable safeboot and the click network underneath it and then click apply then OK it will ask if you want to restart you should restart it
4. Once it is restarted you should go to msconfig again and then turn off safe boot and the apply and restart again and hopefully once you have done that things should return to normal

-from a genius at "http://forums.windowscentral.com/" . . . . Thank You!

. . . . time flies by . . . .

-Then it is now weeks later and this ugly No-Start/No-Cortana/No-Notifications problem arises again for me, seemingly out of nowhere, though I'm certain it is something I am invoking . . . so I try all of the common and successful past solutions and nothing works a repair.
Out of ideas and reluctant to do a partition restore back to last week, I ran an old standby, Tweaking.com - Windows Repair Free/Pro
-and YAY!! -Fixed!
Still unsure where the problem resides, as it was approximately half-way through the 'Repairs' section of the diagnostic that Windows 10 was fixed.
All for now-

DCaesar100 · 07 Feb 2016

DaveGrant01 said:

-

1. Go to the desktop, right click anywhere, hover your mouse over new and then click shortcut
2. When you are making a shortcut it will ask you to type a location. type in "msconfig", click next and then it will ask you what you want to name the shortcut name it anything you want it's not important.
3 . A shortcut for msconfig will show up double click it and click on the boot tab at the top. Once in the boot tab enable safeboot and the click network underneath it and then click apply then OK it will ask if you want to restart you should restart it
4. Once it is restarted you should go to msconfig again and then turn off safe boot and the apply and restart again and hopefully once you have done that things should return to normal

-from a genius at "http://forums.windowscentral.com/" . . . . Thank You!

-

Thanks DaveGrant01
This works to me. Hope forever!

DCaesar

abocha · 18 Mar 2016

DaveGrant01 said:

-Then it is now weeks later and this ugly No-Start/No-Cortana/No-Notifications problem arises again for me, seemingly out of nowhere, though I'm certain it is something I am invoking . . . so I try all of the common and successful past solutions and nothing works a repair.
Out of ideas and reluctant to do a partition restore back to last week, I ran an old standby, Tweaking.com - Windows Repair Free/Pro
-and YAY!! -Fixed!
Still unsure where the problem resides, as it was approximately half-way through the 'Repairs' section of the diagnostic that Windows 10 was fixed.
All for now-

Thank you so much for this program, it works like a charm! I've had this problem on 2 profiles, reinstalled my system and over time it appeared every time nevertheless. Now I have a tool to solve it again if it ever comes up!
By the way, it seems that maybe power outages or just emergency shutdowns cause these issues.

mdybluz · 04 May 2016

victor said:

I have upgraded to windows 10 from 8.1 and been using it for the last week now with no problems.
Today, during a mandatory update my pc went blue screen and said it had to restart.
Once it restarted it updated and booted fine.
However after the update I realized that my start menu stopped working.
If I press it nothing shows up. It is the same with my search menu.
Also none of my taskbar icons will work like the volume and notifications.

I have searched the internet and tried all the solutions provided like windows powershell and uninstalling antivirus and restarting explorer but nothing seems to work for me.
I can't reformat and clean install at the moment because it's really inconvenient for me and have some important files and big programs that I can't back up.

Can anyone please provide me a solution for this bug?
Is there anyway I can reinstall the last update again manually?
Or if I revert back to win 8.1 would this problem still persist?
I can't afford to lose anything since I am away and need my computer for work.

This may help you. Open command prompt as administrator. You can do this by right clicking on command prompt and from the drop down menu choose: "run as administrator". Type in powershell next to the blinking cursor. Wait for blinking cursor to show again copy and paste this :
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

If it does not begin to run, hit enter on your keyboard. It may take several minutes to complete.