Microsoft Windows 10 Start Menu Critical Error
Having upgraded both our PC's from Windows 7 Premium Edition to Windows 10 I was initially pleased with the results. Unfortunately though, a nightmare was about to unfold. Both computers developed the now widely publicized 'Critical Error - Start menu and Cortana aren't working. We'll try to fix it the next time you sign in' when clicking on the Start Menu. Searching the web turned up plenty of suggested fixes but plenty of people reporting that the suggested fixes hadn't worked for them. So began a long and frustrating journey to find a solution. I'm pleased to say I have found a solution but at the cost of much personal time and effort. Let me first document the symptoms I've experienced.
1.> Left clicking on the Start Menu produces the Critical Error but right clicking works ok.
2.> Clicking in Cortana does not respond.
3.> Clicking on the Notification/Action Center Icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen does not respond.
4.> Trying to add a new account to the PC on the Accounts screen does not respond.
5.> The Edge browser doesn't respond when launched
Looking in the event viewer, I was getting a bunch of errors connected to the Users Profile Service - Event ID 1542 - Windows cannot load classes registry file.
DETAIL - Access is denied.
So started a long journey looking for these problems on the web and hoping to find a solution. I began applying the solutions I found but none were resolving the problems. Getting increasingly frustrated I turned to Microsoft support and they suggested the same fixes that I could find online. I patiently re-executed everything without success and eventually Microsoft support could only come up with one final suggesting of executing a 'Reset' of Windows which could leave my files in place, but effectively reinstall Windows so that all the knowledge of my existing programs would be lost and I would have to reinstall them. Windows 10 was supposed to be an upgrade rather than a new installation so there was no way I was going down this route. Having exhausted the web and Microsoft there was nothing else to do but try to figure it out from what I'd learned along the way .
I'd managed to partially fix one of the PCs by executing some of the suggested fixes online. I found the notification/action center icon would begin responding again and the start menu would stop raising the critical error message but then just remain unresponsive. After a few reboots however, the system would revert to the state documented above.
Clearly then the suggested fixes were helping but something continued to go wrong and reset Windows 10 to its broken state. I started to think what might be common in terms of applications running on both our PCs and wondered whether it might be the Antivirus/Firewall which is Norton 360 Premium. I'd also read posts online of users who had been using the Avast antivirus solution who'd experienced the same problem and removed Avast which has fixed the problem. With this in mind I deinstalled Norton 360, which alone had no impact on the problems.
I then started to apply the commands that I'd found online that could potentially be a fix but had so far been unsuccessful on my systems. The commands I executed are supplied here by a Microsoft Support Engineer - see post #2 by Kalpana Shankarappa.
Running the first command, WSReset.exe, created a popup error message regarding a registry error, but when clicking on Ok the command continued to execute and do something, although there was no other feedback on the screen.
I'd read online that the next command, the "dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth" command, may have to be run up to 3 times and so that's what I did.
Having launched a powershell, I then ran the final command in the article 3 times as well. The article then goes on to suggest a Windows repair but I found I could now click on the notification/action center icon and get a response so I just rebooted at this point.
On restart, all the problems apart from Cortana were fixed (and I'm not really worried if Cortana works anyway).
So now I have a functioning version of Windows 10 on one of my computers, albeit at the expense of Norton 360. I'm now going to reinstall Norton and see if the problems return. I'm also going to apply the same sequence to the other PC and see if the problems are resolved. I'll follow up with another blog post and let you know the outcomes...............