Start Menu & Cortana not Opening in Microsoft Windows 10

There can be multiple reasons for the broken Start Menu and as usual, one solution cannot fit everywhere. Still, you should definitely give the following a try and who knows, the Start Menu starts working again, saving you from a full reset or reinstalling Windows 10 again.

Do backup any data you’ve saved in the Modern Apps as all of them will be re-installed. Desktop software and apps won’t be affected though.

1. Open Windows PowerShell as Administrator
   1. Right click Start () button
   2. Choose Command prompt (Admin)
   3. Key in Powershell in the black window and hit Enter
2. Paste the following command in the Administrator: Windows PowerShell window and press Enter key:

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

Wait for PowerShell to execute and complete the command. Ignore the few errors (in red color) that may pop up.

3. When it finishes, try hitting Start and hopefully it’ll start working. If not, this solution won’t apply to you, unfortunately.

Are you able to solve it for you by following the procedure mentioned above or it fails? If it it fails, do make sure that you ran Powershell as Administrator (window will be called Administrator: Windows PowerShell ) and gave the command enough time to execute.
Still no luck? You can get everything to work fine by creating a new user account and working under it. You will lose some of your user data, but most of the files and documents can be transferred over by copying the data from Desktop, Documents, Picture and other libraries.