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Start button + Windows Taskbar Icons Not working on ALL ACCOUNTS
Hello, I have quite a doozer for anyone willing to help me out... I consider myself very tech savvy but I'm out of ideas.
I am getting the classic issue of not being able to use the start button and windows taskbar icons.
Symptom: Clicking start icon (or pressing windows key) does nothing. Taskbar windows icons (ex: time, wifi, battery, sound) does nothing. Right-clicking on these icons work.
While the right-clicking works, this is insanely annoying. I have to open every program using a search program (Ex: Everything), and logging off/shut down/etc requires using ctrl+alt+del to access the button. This is slowly driving me mad.
Preface (Yes there's a preface!): In original account A (administrator account), the search wasn't working. So I made a new account (Account B) after giving up and moved all my files there, including files in AppData. Stated symptoms did not exist then.
A day ago, suddenly, the symptoms started. I have no idea why. I searched many forums for possible solutions and tried most of the common ones:
1. sfc /scannow -> Nothing found
2. Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth -> Successfully run but didn't change anything
3. Powershell: Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"} -> Did not change anything
At this point I activated the original "Administrator" account that all win10 installs come with and tried that.... to be surprised Start menu+taskbar icons don't work there either!
I thought about making another administrator account as a test. I went to settings where I make a new account... except that clicking "Add someone else to this PC" doesn't do anything..... similar to how clicking the windows button doesn't do anything... hmmmm.... I had to make it by accessing the local group settings and manually making a new user under the Administrators group. The test account still has the symptom.
I did some more searching and tried out deleting the TileDataLayer folder, which didn't work. I even went to a different laptop with a working windows 10 install, and got its TileDataLayer folder and copied it to my problem install. It didn't work. [This process was a bit finicky as I had to keep stopping the associated service, but I think it worked correctly]
As a final try I went to safe mode.... I was pretty amazed to find out it was problematic there too!
I have a lot of files and programs and I strongly would prefer not having to start from a fresh install (maybe even that won't work...?). Switching from Account A to B took half a day. Starting from a fresh install will probably take longer....
Is there anything I can try? Or do I have to start fresh... while sobbing? Any help is appreciated. Thank you in advance.