Windows 10: Start Menu and Blank icons. Literally.

I can't open the start menu and I don't know why. The only thing I can do to it is right-click, nothing else. I cannot left-click it or even use the windows button. Also, there are two of my apps - Store and Microsoft Edge - have a blank icon. I can't open them nor unpin them to the taskbar. Please help. *Sad




If you look at the taskbar the blank icons are between media player and google chrome.

:)

 

Blank Icons In Start Menu

The way to get to safe mode is not working for an usb keyboard because my usb keyboard is not working when I am asked to select F4 or F5 to go into safe mode. The mouse does not work either. Bad design.

 

Blank Icons In Start Menu

Hi,

Thank you for posting your reply.

I understand your concern, and we in Community will try to help you in the best possible way we can.

Enable the built-in administrator account and check if the issue persist.

To enable the built-in administrator follow the below steps:

Press CTRL+Shift+ESC to open Task Manager.

Click File > Run New Task

Make sure you have a check mark beside “Create this task with administrative privileges”

Type CMD and hit Enter. Then type or copy/paste the below command into it and hit Enter again

net user administrator /active:yes

Once you're done with the troubleshooting try to disable the administrator profile by replacing the
yes with
no in the above command line

Once you enable the administrator account, logout from the current user profile and login to the built-in administrator account and check if issue persist in the built-in administrator account.

If the issue does not persist in administrator account, come back to the user profile and create a new user profile and check if the issue persist.

If you are facing issues with key board and mouse,
I suggest that you update your Key board and Mouse drivers and check if it helps.

Follow the steps below to perform an update.

• Click on the Start button, and type “Device Manager” on the search bar.
• Open Device Manager, expand “Mice and other pointing devices”.
• Find and double-click graphic adapter from the left panel to uninstall.
• Right-click the device, and click Uninstall.
• Windows will prompt you to confirm the device’s removal. Click OK to remove the driver.
• After the uninstallation is complete, reboot your computer.

Restart the system and let the PC download the drivers on its own.

Follow the same steps for key board as well.



Hope the information helps, if you have any further queries, feel free to post. We are here to assist you.

Thank you.

 

A bit of history might be useful. Like, what version of win 10 are you running, has it always been like this, did it do this after something else was done etc.

If you have a Restore Point before this happened, you could try a restore.

Or there is sfc /scannow from an admin command prompt.

Or maybe someone else here knows what really is causing this!

PS Always have a recent disk image before messing with stuff!

 

Yup, same thing here. Seems like it might be pretty common, and it makes windows completely unstable.

Start menu button and search stopped opening/working Win 10

Black screen after login

Start Menu Not Opening - Windows 10 64 bits

https://www.tenforums.com/general-dis...t-working.html

Had this bullshit on every win 10 installation (1 upgrade first, then 3 clean installs) and every single one of them got nuked by this bug after around 2-3 weeks. It has something to do with user corruption afaik, and nothing I have tried fixed it at all. Seems like all we can do is wait for MS to fix, but there are some fixes you might try in those threads, hopefully they do more for you than they did for me. My final solution was going back to win 7, and everything is golden again for some weeks now. Good riddance to this OS until extreme bugs like this get fixed.

Looking at the last posts of the latest link I posted, it seems like it might be connected to dropbox of all things. Do you have it installed? If so, try uninstalling it and reboot.