If you can’t open the Start Menu in Windows 10 and have no idea what can be done about it, you are not alone. We can only suspect this is a frequent issue, along with the inability to open Cortana since Microsoft released a troubleshooter dedicated to finding and fixing issues related to accessing the Start menu and Cortana in Windows 10.
Assuming your system is up to date and the good old system restart failed to resolve the issue, you might want to give the Start Menu troubleshooter a try.
How to use Microsoft’s Start Menu troubleshooter
No install is required so just download the app from the link below and double click to run it.
Download Start Menu troubleshooter
Once the troubleshooter window pops up, click on Next and wait for its analysis to finish.
If any problems are detected, it will automatically fix them, and you can enable this option under Advanced.
If you actually have problems accessing the Windows 10 Start Menu or Cortana and the troubleshooter doesn’t detect any, you will have to find alternative solutions. Regardless of the result, you can view a detailed troubleshooting report if you click on View detailed information.
Here, you’ll be able to see all the verifications performed by the Start Menu troubleshooter and issues, if any.
To sum things up, the tool will scan for problems related to incorrectly installed programs, and problems related to database corruption, registry key permissions and application manifest corruption.
It doesn’t fix things all the times, but it’s free and it takes just a few minutes or even less to try it.
When all else fails, you can always take the one path that usually fixes things, and that is to reset your PC. It’s not a convenient solution by any means, but being unable to access the Start Menu definitely proves how important that area of Windows 10 is, and that we all need it quite often.
