Windows 10: Start menu, other critical Win10 programs unavailable after upgrade from Win7

After upgrading from Win7 and installing "updates" I was first greeted with a blank screen. I hit a button and got the "critical error start menu not available". Reboot a few times and eventually my desktop showed up but start menu etc are still unavailable. I can right click start menu icon, cannot type into search area, left/right clicking on icons for Win10 programs (e.g. store, notifications) do nothing Googled it and got advice to do e.g.

(from powershell)

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

though I get a series of errors, e.g.:

Add-AppxPackage : Deployment failed with HRESULT: 0x80073CF6, Package could not be registered.
error 0x80070005: Cannot register the request because the following error was encountered while initializing the
windows.repositoryExtension extension: Access is denied.


got "more" information with command: Get-AppPackageLog -ActivityID cf54331f-b060-0004-673b-54cf60b0d501

12/11/2019 2:31:11 PM 404 AppX Deployment operation failed for package Microsoft.AsyncTextService_10.0.18362.449_neutral__8wekyb3d8bbwe with error 0x80073CF6. The specific error text for this failure is: error 0x80070005: Cannot register the request because the following error was encountered while initializing the windows.repositoryExtension extension: Access is denied. .


Not particularly useful. There's nothing in the forum to explain how to fix.


Tried checking for additional updates. I can't! It's unavailable! If I run "ms-settings:" from Win-R and get:

"package could not be registered."

Also nothing in forums to fix this.


Clearly something is terribly corrupt. Another hint(?), I can run powershell by manually finding it in explorer. But if I try from the right click Start menu I get "Windows cannot find '%DappData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\WIndows PowerShell\Windows PowerShell.lnk'.



At this point the computer is 90% unusable. I also cannot recover from the Win7 backup that I made because it refuses to allow me to do so.

:)

 

Upgrade to Win10 from Win7 desktop, windows update

I did the upgrade from Win7 to Win10 last week. It seemed to go fine but I have no desktop icons, no apps listed on the Start Menu, All Apps option, and Windows Update has been stuck at 2% downloading an update. I've run sfc /scannow and DISM through
advanced command prompt with no change in behavior. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.

 

start button behavior win7 vs. win10

• in win7, pushing the start button and typing would bring up (immediately) a list of hits among the installed programs.
• in win10, doing the above retrieves search results from the internet (with some latency), and only then brings up any installed programs (with even more latency).

Is there a way to make Win10 revert to Win7 behavior in this respect?

 

Critical Error Start menu

I have same problem and none of the posted suggestions work. I did a system restore and it almost works except the start menu is not properly organized and the programs are listed in a different than normal manner. after a few hours when I click on the
start menu the critical error pops up again and says it will try to repair on the net login, which does not repair the problem. but if I do a restore it will work for a few hours and then repeats