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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

FIX: Startmenu and Cortana not working

Last weekend one of my friends had trouble with Startmenu and Cortana. Both were not working. He tried all the different fixes he found in the internet. None of them where working. There was one of them with a powershell command to re-register the Startmenu but even this was not working after a reboot either.

But we found the ultimate solution which is also very easy to implement.

Its important to know the root cause for this issue. For some reason the user profile got corrupted during a wrong situation (e.g. through powerloss in the wrong moment, AV scanner issues, etc.)


(If it reappears after this fix here the chance is high you have issues with your AV scanner. Remove it and use another one. If you did not use any other AF than Windows defender will kick in after 3 days to make sure that your machine is at least protected with him. And Windows Defender is now better than its reputation).

The good message its easy to recover without data loss. (This here worked at least in V1511 (Build 10.10586))


#### UPDATE 1 from March 19th 2016 ####

There are a couple other considerations arround I found:

1. Also 3rd Party add ons may corrupt Start Menu (check taskbar)
    Some found e.g. that dropbox application ("which officially was stated as Win10 compatible") caused this and they had to remove it!

2. Also other antivirus solutions may cause this (as referred above)

3. Let run in admin cmd: sfc.exe /SCANNOW to check for OS integrity

4. Also just try a regular reboot through: shutdown.exe /f /r /t:0
    (This was once the key on my wifes Dell Venue pro 8. My 2nd Account solution here did not worked with her. The 2nd Account also did not Show up the start menu right away. Simply the reboot fixed it. It seems there was some os config pending in the Background waiting for a regular reboot.)

#### UPDATE 1 END ####


1. Do a backup of your profile documents you want to keep.
(e.g. C:\Users\USERNAME\documents, videos, music, favorites, etc.) 
VERY IMPORTANT as we will delete your whole profile !!!
WIN key + E opens the explorer

If your current user is setup with the Microsoft account and you let the express settings then all your profile setup is synced to OneDrive. This helps a lot! Your settings get automatically reapplied when logging in first time when your account get recreated. You still need to backup your personal files!

2. Create a second user which has admin rights (now it becomes a little bit tricky, how to access the settings when Start, Cortana and Action center wont work)

  A. Right click taskbar on an empty space --> Click on "TASKMANAGER" to open it.
  B. In Taskmanager --> Click File --> Click "RUN NEW TASK"
  C. In Run new task type in: lusrmgr.msc and press ENTER
  D. Click on "Users"
  E. Right click in the middle pane to add a "New User ..."





4. Then add to this new local user the administrators group.

  A. Double click on the new created user
  B. Click on "Member of" tab.
  C. Click on "Add"
  D. Type in "Administrators"
  E. Click on "Check names"





Now you should logout and login with the new user.

5. Now we need to delete the old user.

  A: Open elevated Command Prompt.
  B: Type the following Command and hit enter key:
  net user username /delete
  wait until the command finished successfully
(replace “username” with the user account name which you would like to delete)
6. Reboot the system and login again with the new local user
7. Recreate the original user

  A. Right click taskbar --> Click on "TASKMANAGER" to open it.
      (Alternate shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + ESC)
  B. In Taskmanager --> Click File --> Click "RUN NEW TASK"
  C. In Run new task type in: ms-settings:otherusers and press ENTER
  D. Click in "Other users" on "Add someone else to this PC"
       Here add your original Microsoft account you used before.
       If you used "express settings" initially on the system setup
       then your settings would sync back from OneDrive :-)





8. Reboot and enjoy your recreated profile.
9. OPTIONALLY: Copy back your backup files from step 1 if you made a backup of your documents, videos etc.

And actually that's it!

Enjoy your recreated profile.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Move on to EDGE: How to import IE favorites in Edge

As time goes by Edge gets better and better. Soon the additional addons arrive.
And from speed perspective I really love Edge. He is much faster and smoother then IE.

I know not yet everything works. But from build to build I see more improvements.

That drove me to the descision to move on with EDGE first and only switch back to IE when needed.

You can simply control the default URL handler behaviour with the IE Enterprise Mode that let even control which URL is opened with which browser. But this will be another blog post.

This blog is really about the way to import IE favorites into Edge.
And now it is really simple to do that.

See here the simple steps:

Click on HUB and then on FAVORITES SETTINGS
 
 
Then Click on IMPORT

 
finally you see all the imported favorites.
 
Sometimes it is necessary to close and reopen the browser to see the full list of imported favorites.


Checkout soon for the next Edge related blog