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

My neighbor's Windows 10 Start Menu has been crashing with a critical error for some time. I saw this post, and we uninstalled Dropbox last night (12/9/2015) and rebooted his laptop . His Start Menu works fine now.

 

Brian,

Thank you this posting.

My wife's laptop does not like having the power-supply turned on while it is booting up, but hey, I forgot and when it jammed I held the power button down to kill it.

After five retries to the "Start menu & Cortana aren't working. We'll try to fix it next time you sign in." message I found this thread through my laptop.

Anyway, I followed your suggestion and was greeted by an 'Updating your computer' message. This took three minutes to get to 30% completed, a second reboot that said 70% completed, and a long time to actually start. But start it did, so thank you very much for this 'uninstall free' method of over coming my stupidity.

David

 

I thought I should report how I have achieved a degree of functionality for the moment.



I had the Start Menu Critical error a few weeks after upgrading from 8.1. I did find that uninstalling and then reinstalling Dropbox and Norton 360 cured the critical error message, and that was about six weeks ago and I have had no further such messages.



However, the Start Menu was wrecked, there were few tiles showing on it and none of the important ones. So I followed the instruction I had seen here and on Ten Forums to set up an administrator account and use that to replace the start menu in the faulty account (it is in C:\Users\Account Name\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer



This partially succeeded in that I had a normal sized Start menu with all the tiles but, unfortunately, most of then were pale blue and did not work.



So I set up another User Account completely and this worked perfectly, but I did not have access to any of my files, settings or bookmarks from the original still faulty account Trying to transfer or share them did not work well).



However this week my PC updated itself with the latest version of 10 (which I think was 10586, dated 12 Nov!). So optimistically I deleted the TileDataLayer folder in the faulty account and, again, replaced it by a copy of the from the Admin account. That has, largely, been successful. All of the tiles in the start menu of the faulty account now work, so I can use Edge, Word, Mail etc. However, some of the tiles are still pale blue rather than dark blue (as they were in the Admin account start menu) and Task Bar is not quite right in that the search box and the Edge icon are not there. But basically everything works, so I am well pleased. For how long remains to be seen.



Whether this will help anyone else I have no idea and I agree with others that it is a disgrace that Microsoft has allowed this to continue for so long and all this DIY has been necessary.

 

Do not uninstall Avast or stop using it. Just update it regularly. I face same problem today and got it fixed by just updating Avast and then restarting. Good Luck!! *Smile*Biggrin *Start

 

Do not uninstall Avast or stop using it. Just update it regularly. I faced same problem today and got it fixed by just updating Avast and then restarting. Good Luck!! *Smile*Biggrin*chuckle

 

After fixing the Start menu error and repairing the tiles in the menu itself I thought I was on top of this. However, the critical error has now returned and uninstalling Dropbox and my anti-virus and rebooting has absolutely no effect. Very annoying.

 

It depends what version the dropbox you had running was as I think only 3.10 had the issue while the newer versions with the most recent 3.1.2.6 no longer has the issue.

 

Thanks for info, but the fact is that I still have the start menu error.

 

That part I know, what I meant was it depends what version of dropbox you had installed that you uninstalled as if you already had the newer versions, then dropbox had nothing to do with the problem. I used to have the problem with Windows 10 Build 10240 which gave me the start menu error a little bit under 30 days after each Windows installation that I fixed with a in-place upgrade install of Windows 10 and then it happened again within 30 days over and over until I uninstalled dropbox 3.10 and installed the newest version at that time which was 3.11 and then the problem never came back. October 26, 2015 was my last in-place upgrade install of Windows 10 10240.

 

I removed "DropBox" solved all issues which were: no start menu, Microsoft Edge, and in Control Panel "Settings" nothing worked on the "Accounts" page not to mention Cortana. If you have downloaded DropBox, right click the start menu go to programs and features and uninstall DropBox. You can always download & reinstall it!

 

"uninstalling Avast was all I needed to get my laptop back. You're the best!" That quote was exactly what is needed. My new laptop worked only a couple of weeks until the Critical Error message came up. After searching for supposed fixes I tried uninstalling Avast and that did the trick. I sent an email to Avast but have not heard from hem yet.

 

I struggled with Dropbox causing the critical start error problem for the last 6 weeks or so. Uninstalling Dropbox fixed it then when I reinstalled Dropbox from the Dropbox web site the problem always came back.

A few days ago I discovered that there was a Dropbox app avaliable from the MS Shop. Downloaded the app and now all is sweet and looks like staying that way.

 

*Smile*Smile
This is the second time the Windows 10 startup error pop up "Start Menu and Cortana aren't working..." I followed the instruction to restore the OS to a previous state and it works now.

Thank you
*Cool

 

I found the Dropbox uninstall/reinstall fix elsewhere and it worked, for a week or so. Found this forum and tried RadDad's suggestion and it worked! Hoping it stays fixed. Thanks!





Originally Posted by RadDad


I found that opening task manager and doing an end task on the Local Security Authority Process ( 5 ) would reboot the computer and clear the error.

Press Ctrl Alt Del buttons at the same time . The Task Manager window opens. Then locate the process I mentioned above. Right click it and choose end task. Wait while the computer reboots.

 

Same exact problem... even Microsoft's tech support couldn't help. Suspect it is Symantec's Antivirus causing 1511 update to fail and now I get the "CRITICAL ERROR - Start Menu and CORTANA aren't working. W'll try to fix it the next time you sign in. SIGN OUT NOW..." I'll try to figure out how to boot up the damaged computer so I can shutdown the antivirus and see what happens.