Windows 10: CRITICAL ERROR - Start Menu and CORTANA aren't working. W'll try to fi

Of all of the antivirus I have ever tried and I have tried all of them, only ESET NOD32 has done what it claims to do. There is an anti virus and a smart security, avoid the smart security. Avoid any antivirus that takes over the windows firewall. That includes Mcafee and Norton. Norton especially, their entire package consists of software that used to be great on its own which is they took ownership of and incorporated it into their tools, mainly WRQ AtGuard Firewall - norton's firewall still incorporates that stolen software. WRQ was very angry about it so they offered their firewall package for free. This was back in Windows 98, there was a version that ran in XP made by someone in the WRQ users group.

An anti virus should only be an anti virus and should not take over Microsoft's already very decent firewall.

Now Malwarebytes is great and it gets some of the worst infections, but it is simply not an antivirus, you have to have something that will catch the viruses. And of all of the packages I've tried, only the combination of Malware bytes and ESET has the least impact on my system. I just installed it last week, and my system CPU does not Peg-Out as much. I had been having trouble with high CPU usage and I had to wait until I had dealt with that before I installed antivirus.

 

Having had a go at most of these "fixes" and failing I did what I had to do with my wife's computer which had a similar problem in 8.1 and mine in 10. Simply disable fast boot. I was finding that a restart always fixed the problem so concluded that if I slow booted every time the problem would go away. It did. It looks like fast booting sometimes "misses" things like the keyboard and log in box because it is too quick for things to "take" on the way along booting up.

 

The way to fix the error is go to the patch KB3093266 its a windows patch and delete it. Then stop windows from auto upgrading. This was a patch to fix the issue but it causes it. I have fixed six machines by doing this and it works well. Just go to windows updates once in awhile and see if they have another patch to fix this patch.

 

Just delete windows patch KB3093266 and turn of auto update this will stop the error. Restart is needed I believe.

 

Thanks, Balisteve!

Here's Microsoft's page on the System File Checker. Basically, it looks for missing or corrupted system files and replaces them from a special cache on your system disk. On my system, it took about 12 minutes to run.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929833

To access the Command Prompt (Admin), right-click on the Windows Icon.

Tracy Hall Jr

 

Based on the above, after 3 restarts I could access search again, so quickly disabled Hibernate (who hibernates these days?). then asked Avast to update the program, it wanted to install the latest version (maybe they know something?)! Anyway, so far all is working. I've upgraded about a dozen PC's and only got this problem once, weird.

 

Reboot and keep pressing F8, for now it's solved... Microsoft, start putting your hand on the dirt....

 

Thanx dude, defiantly did the trick.

 

This fixed the problem, thank you

 

In case anyone on this thread is still having issues, I found something that worked for me. It seems like there may be an issue between Dropbox & Windows 10. I uninstalled it & restarted my computer. The critical error is gone! I don't know if there are any other issues, but this solution actually worked for me.

 

I have just tried this and it has worked for me, so far. Does anyone know why? However, my Start menu is not complete, some apps seem to be missing. Otherwise fine. Well done RadDad!

 

I am sharing my solution on every site where I found helpful advice. I do not have Avast, have tried the sfc scannow solution, the safe boot, the F8 and everything else I found online but nothing worked. Finally I found a thread on the Dropbox Community that suggested that Win10 had a conflict with Dropbox. Per their instructions I uninstalled Dropbox (I use Revouninstall and then CCleaner to clean up), rebooted and found the Win10 Start menu functioned just fine. I then reinstalled Dropbox, have rebooted several times and the Win10 Start button continues to work just fine. If you've tried everything else and you happen to have Dropbox on your machine I suggest giving this a try.

 

Do you have the link to the thread on the Dropbox Community as I couldn't find it?

 

I think that I may need to try this. The fix from RadDad only worked once, unfortunately, and now I still have a critical error every time I try the Start Menu.

 

Yes, this has worked for me as well, and I just used the built in uninstaller. However, I have not yet reinstalled Dropbox. As with my earlier temporary fix (stopping the Local Security Process) the Start menu is not quite normal, for example, most of the "Life at a glance" tiles are missing. Still, I think I can work with it. So, thanks Gophigure!