Windows 10: Start menu, Cortana and explorer stop responding.

I upgraded to 10 from 8.1 on Friday and everything worked great. Suddenly, on the following Monday afternoon Windows began to act up. Either at the desktop or while in a game, suddenly the start menu and Cortana will stop responding. Usually shortly thereafter Explorer will stop responding, as well.

If I hover over items on the start bar - buttons, Cortana search, pinned applications, the system tray - the item will highlight like I can interact with it. But when I click, nothing happens. The start menu won’t open, Cortana won’t open, applications won’t start, etc.

This seems to happen between thirty and forty-five minutes after booting up. I checked the event logs for Application, Security and System; there are critical errors but after spending a few hours following up, those don’t seem to be related at all. I did not drill down any further than those logs.

I’ve attempted the solution at the following link, without any success. https://www.techmesto.com/fix-start-...nical-preview/ I’ve also attempted a system restore to the previous day when everything was still working, but again, no luck.

Has anyone experience these issues, too? Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated; I’m out of ideas. Thank you!

Update: I've now been running two hours without issue so I don't think time is necessarily a factor. Also, the last thing I installed was VMware Player, if that is relevant at all. I'm uninstalling it now.



:)

 

Start menu, Cortana and explorer stop responding.

I'm having the exact same problem after the upgrade. It happens every day when I use my Laptop. It gives an error " The application is not responding. The program may respond again if you wait. Do you want to end the process".

I've checked every piece of event logs but cannot find the cause or fix. Please let me know if you get to now anything on this.

Thanks.

 

Start menu, Cortana and explorer stop responding.

I upgraded to 10 from 8.1 on Friday (July 31st) and everything worked great. Suddenly, on the following Monday afternoon Windows began to act up. Either at the desktop or while in a game, suddenly the start menu and Cortana will stop responding. Usually
shortly thereafter Explorer will stop responding, as well.

If I hover over items on the start bar - buttons, Cortana search, pinned applications, the system tray - the item will highlight like I can interact with it. But when I click, nothing happens. The start menu won’t open, Cortana won’t open, applications won’t
start, etc. Control-Alt-Delete is also unresponsive.

I checked the event logs for Application, Security and System; there are critical errors but after spending a few hours following up on each, those don’t seem to be related at all. I did not drill down any further than those logs.

I’ve attempted the solution at the following link, without any success. Fix: Start Menu & Cortana not Opening in Windows 10 I’ve also attempted a system restore to the previous day when everything was still working, but again, no luck.
I've run sfc /scannow and it reports no violations.

The last thing I installed before the problems began was VMware Player. I have since uninstalled it and it seems that the time until the freeze is triggered is better, but it still happens.

Has anyone experience these issues, too? Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated; I’m out of ideas. Thank you!

 

Having the exact same issue. Everything was good when I initially updated last week. Started seeing problems today. File Explorer is constantly freezing and basically unusable. Sometimes Windows will shut it down completely and I lose all Icons on the Taskbar and System Tray. I've updated my Bios and got the Win10 Chipset Drivers for my Mobo and still the problem persist. Very, very frustrating. Hope this bumps this up so somehow see it who may have a solution.*Mad

 

I've had same problem - sometimes after machine on for a few hours, sometimes straight after waking from sleep. Only thing to do was to shut down and start up again. Just doing a restart sometimes did not fix it.

 

Have you already tried sfc/scannow in an admin cmd? Maybe there are some corrupt files on your system drive.

 

Not yet, but I will try it tonight and report back. Thank you!

 

Just ran sfc /scannow and no integrity violations found. Honestly considering doing a reset at this point, but I don't like leaving problems hanging without an answer in case they come back.

 

I also saw this problem several hours ago.

I followed the solution on Microsoft community site and fixed my start menu / cortana:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...=1438445987147

Needless to say, I don't like the idea of running admin commands from internet...

 

I'm also having this problem. It started happening as soon as I booted up after updating. I have found the time at which it "hangs/stops responding" varies - sometimes I get 45 minutes of use, sometimes only 10! I have try reinstalling (reupdating), uninstalling windows updates and creating a new user, and the problem is still present.

The only time I haven't had a problem was booting into safe mode. However, I didn't stay in there long enough to determine if the issue was present there as well. - I'm going to try this today and leave it on for a few hours with some programs running and see if responds.

I have read on a couple of other threads elsewhere that 3rd party antivirus/firewall during installation may be the cause of the problem. I'm gonna try and investigate this a bit more..

 

Thanks for the suggestion, but it's the same method I tried earlier and linked to above. Sadly, it didn't work for me.

Update: Not sure if this is wishful thinking or if it means something, but it seems to take longer after boot up for the freezing to trigger.

 

Not sure how long it will last but I have had success (now 6hrs on time - no problems) by right-clicking on the taskbar, going to properties and unticking 'use small taskbar buttons' (I had it enabled from 8.1). Not sure what relevance it exactly has, but someone suggested in this reddit thread to 'fiddle' around with some taskbar properties.
I will keep this thread updated if it takes a turn for the worse!

Reverted back to what it was doing...*Mad

 

Update: The problem seems to have stopped. It hasn't happened in two days and everything I've previously done that seemed to have triggered it is no longer producing the same results. I honestly don't know if it's gone or just hibernating, in a sense. As someone in the industry I personally hate it when bugs just magically fix themselves, but... I'll post back any further information when/if I have it. I don't consider the problem solved, just dormant.

 

I'm experiencing the same problem since running Windows 10. The problem is, that i cannot reproduce it clearly. Sometimes my machine runs two weeks absolutely flawlessly and then there are days, where I must reboot every 5-30min after Startup. The Applications i started keep running, but the Start-Button becomes unresponsive. I cannot kill the explorer-process, too, when this arises. Task-Manager says: Access denied. I'm running as a user being in the local Admins Group and UAC is turned off.
sfc /scannow says all ok besides some opencl.dll-checksum-error of my nvidia graphics driver, which seems to be a common problem but has nothing to do with my start-button-problem.
I had this Problem with Windows 8, too, but it stopped occurring, when i installed Windows 8.1. After (clean) installing Windows 10 the problem is back again - with and without 1511-Update.