Windows 10: My Windows 10 Search Box suddenly changed without warning

I've been running Win 10 since the end of July. Yesterday, without any input on my part, my search box appears as a black box with 3 small icons on the upper left hand corner of the box. There is a search field at the bottom, however, when I enter a search request, nothing happens. The screen remains as I described above. I want to change the search box to how it looked when I first started using Windows 10.

I should also point out that the other day, my desktop completely changed to what I discovered was the "tablet view". I was able to switch that back to the desktop view. This change was not because of anything I did.

Update (8/17): Some additional information.

• The problem described here only impacts my account. There is another user on the PC and search works fine.
• I checked the search and indexing services to make sure they were running. They were.
• I rebuilt the index just in case it had been corrupted. No help.
• I rant the Windows Troubleshooter for search and index yesterday. It gave me a result of improper permissions and said it was fixed. However, the search feature did not work. I ran the same troubleshooter this morning (8/17) and no errors found. But problem still exists.
• This afternoon I thought I'd activate Cortana hoping that would turn everything "on" with respect to search. What it did was lock up my keyboard in addition to no improvement in searching.
• Later this afternoon I decided to open Windows in Safe Mode (with networking) and see if the keyboard function returned and if the search problem did/didn't exist. It did NOT exist, and I was able to use the keyboard and perform searches normally.

Now the good news. I rebooted into Windows 10 normally, and low and behold, both the keyboard and the search function work perfectly. For how long; well that's another story.


I hope my situation will help other users who for confronted with this problem in the future.

Thanks.





:)

 

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