I’d been having some problems with the start menu in both Server 2016 and Windows 10 stopping working. Googling around revealed various posts and loads of the same advice on how to fix the problem. These included using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool with the /restorehealth switch;
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
Reinstalling all modern apps via PowerShell with the following command;
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
Creating a new user account and just using that, not an option if the problem affects all accounts on the machine. The only one of the options mentioned that did help was to re-install Windows, this left the start menu working. However as soon as I domain joined the machine again, it stopped working again after a restart. This led me to look at Group Policy as a potential culprit, and sure enough, moving the object to a separate OU and blocking all policy on it left the start menu working. After a long process of linking policies in one by one I came down to a very specific registry setting.
I’d set the ACLs on a specific registry subkey of HKLM, in this case it was HKLM\Software\Microsoft\RPC. These ACLs were missing one specific entry, namely APPLICATION PACKAGE AUTHORITY\ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES.
Adding this in with only read permissions and forcing a policy update brought the start menu immediately back to life. That ACL is one that has appeared in Server 2012 I think, but since that particular part of our policy predates 2012 that ACL wasn’t there. Oddly enough I’ve not seen this cause any problems with Server 2012/2012 R2/Windows 8/8.1, only with Server 2016 & Windows 10.
So the take away from this is to make sure if you restrict any registry ACLs, make sure you include read access for APPLICATION PACKAGE AUTHORITY\ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES.
If all this was helpful and worked for you, please drop a quick note in the comments.
Thanks Mark. This post was very helpful. It helped me track the problem for us down to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Rpc\Extensions registry key.
I gave the ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES group read permissions on the registry key and was able to use the start menu on Windows 2016 next time I logged in.
Mark,
Please can you provide in details step by step to go about it?
Thank you
Baba,
First off, be VERY, VERY CAREFUL doing this if you’ve never used anything like the registry editor before, as getting anything wrong can leave Windows unable to run at all. I’d probably go as far as to say this might not be your problem, as in my case the correct entries were changed via an enterprise group policy, rather than just day to day use. Before attempting this I’d make sure you’ve got a backup of your computer. You do take backups don’t you? Of course you do, who wouldn’t?
If it does help you though you should still be able to right click on the start icon, and click the option to open a Windows PowerShell window. From there if you type “regedit.exe” and press enter that should get you the registry editor open. From there right click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and click “permissions”, then have a look if the ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES has an entry on there. If it does exist, then none of this applies as that’s most likely not your problem, unless you or an administrator has removed that entry somewhere under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. If you find it’s missing, click “add”, and then in the next dialogue box enter ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES and click “ok”, then make sure it’s permissions are set to read under the allow column. Click “ok” on there and that should do it.