Clicking Start Button does nothing

My Win10 Home 64 bit computer was working correctly yesterday. Today there was one notification which just showed 'windows.immersivecontrolpanel-cw5n1h2xyewy! microsoft.windows.it', although I am not sure if the last part was something like 'immersive' as the last character looked strange, so could have been part of a letter.

At the same time I had update KB3081438 which required a restart, so I powered down as usual, rather than restarting, waited 20secs and then started up again. Now clicking the start button does nothing except that the icon changes colour. In addition I had Settings pinned to the task bar and now there is just a space where it used to be. I can click on the messages icon in the tray on the right and open Settings that way, but it is quite slow to respond. I have also noticed that a couple of other icons are missing, but there is a space where they used to be.

I did a System Restore to a restore point created yesterday but all that did was mess up Office 2016 which I had to do a repair on. Quick Repair did not solve the problem but the full repair did, although it was a bit of a struggle to get Office to reconnect to my account as it did not like my MS Passport login, and did not accept the key I copied from MSs website. Bizarre!

Does anyone have any suggestion how to get the Start Button to work again, or do I have to do a Reset and will that cause me any problems with installed software?

Viv

This has happened to me several times in the last week. There are 'solutions' you can google involving powershell scripts to reinstall the windows store apps. I never found them to solve the problem. IME, user profile corruption has been the culprit. I would suggest creating a new user, sign in, and see if the start menu is working for that new user. If it is, then probably your other users profiles are corrupted. Rebuilding your user profile will probably be less of a hassle than a reset.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will try that tomorrow, when my brain is fresh.

Viv

For some reason the new User I created did not appear when I rebooted, nor was it shown when I went back into settings. As I was having more and more problems I decided that the only solution was a clean install. I have nearly finished putting all of my software back on now so hope that I do not get any more problems.

Unfortunately, been there, done that. I've done three clean installs. My strategy now is to make a system image at least once a week (or even every couple of days). That has save me a couple of times from needing to start all over.

I used to do that, and if I can find out how to do it in Windows 10 then I will. Thanks for the advice.

I have used AOMEI Backupper and Macrium Reflect. Free and easy to use. You just need a secondary drive to store the images.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried AOEMI but it decided that the system drive was both C:\ and F:\, with no way to amend that, so I have tried Macrium and this looks as if it work well, and only takes a few minutes to image my System.

Viv