How to fix a broken Windows 10 start menu

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Last year, the start menu on my Windows 10 user account stopped working. When I'd press the Windows button, nothing would happen. There were also issue with a few buttons on the taskbar. Some of them didn't have an icon and when you pressed them, they did nothing. After much searching and frustration, I found out that the TileDataLayer directory under my account may have been corrupted. Unfortunately, I didn't find any tool to fix that or even determine with some certainty that this was the issue. However at this point, I didn't have much to lose, so I went ahead and reset it manually.

Screenshot of commands to fix broken Windows 10 start menu.

Screenshot of commands to fix broken Windows 10 start menu.

By the way, I'm not the first to have this issue. I should also mention that these are steps that worked for me. They may or may not work for you.

I reset the TileDataLayer directory by copying a fresh one from a brand new user account into my current account. You need 3 accounts for this. The reason for this is because you can't copy the TileDataLayer from or to an account that you are currently using. Also, the copying is easier if the account doing the copy is a local admin account.

Steps to reset your TileDataLayer

  1. Assuming you don't already have one, create an admin account.
  2. Assuming you don't already have one, create another user account. For the purposes of these steps we are going to assume the account name is newuser.
  3. From you admin account open up an Administrator: Command Prompt.
  4. Change into the local AppData directory of olduser. For the purposes of these steps we are going to assume that account name is olduser. For the purposes of these steps we are going to assume that the user account directory is c:\Users.
  5. Move the old TileDataLayer directory out of the way. This is also my way of backing it up.
  6. Copy TileDataLayer directory from newuser to olduser.

Commands

  1. cd C:\Users\olduser\AppData\Local
  2. move TileDataLayer TileDataLayer.old
  3. robocopy C:\Users\newuser\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer TileDataLayer /MIR

I don't know if there are any side effects to doing this, however my Start Menu has been working fine for months now. Good luck!

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