Win10 Start Menu Not Customizable

[Will Fastie]

Suddenly (within the last 3 or 4 days sometime) it became impossible to customize the Windows 10 Start menu. Tiles cannot be moved or resized; options to do these things are missing from the right-click context menu.

I’m running Win10 Pro 1909, build 18363.720. I had paused updates in accordance with Woody’s DEFCON 2, but I let them run to see if they would clear the problem and they did not.

The options available differ depending on the tile. In most cases, however, this is what the context menu looks like now. Notice the absence of the resize feature.

Anyone else seeing this problem or, better yet, solved it?

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davemmchenry, woody

[woody]

Strange. I’m not seeing that on my production machines….

(The “More” menu on my Mail tile looks just like yours.)

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by woody.

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Will Fastie

[Will Fastie]

I finally found the answer to this courtesy of Keith Miller in the Microsoft Community forums. It was posted in January but until today I did not see it when searching.

The bottom line is to remove this key from the registry or at least turn it off by setting its value to 0 (zero):

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoChangeStartMenu

This can also be changed with the Group Policy Editor under Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar.

There remains the very important question of how this got set in the first place. I didn’t use the Policy Editor to set the value and certainly did not modify the Registry (because I didn’t know about the existence of this key). Yet the Start Menu still got locked.

Maybe someone can shed some light on that.

[joep517]

Perhaps some third=party tweaking tool?

If this is a work PC, then perhaps Group Policy got pushed from the IT folks.

--Joe

[Will Fastie]

It’s a local machine. The only one pushing it is me (and Microsoft, of course).

I try to avoid using third-party tweaking tools and can’t remember doing so recently. Good thought, though.

[anonymous]

Am I the only person who finds this a bit off?

step by step, inch by inch. . . .

1. Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartMenu\Policy\NoChangeStartMenu

2. Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartMenu\StartMenu\StartMenuChange\Policy\NoChangeStartMenu

3. Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartMenu\StartMenu\StartMenuChange\Policy\NoChangeStartMenu

Isn’t once enough?

[Rick Corbett]

anonymous wrote:

Isn’t once enough?

The third entry with its nested ‘StartMenu\StartMenu’ text seems off. The first two entries should have been sufficient to cover both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of just ‘system-wide’, i.e. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

Where did you get the 3 entries from?

[Rick Corbett]

anonymous wrote:

Isn’t once enough?

I had a look at changing this using Local Group Policy Editor (LGPE).

I ran a registry snapshot then, in the LGPE, enabled Prevent users from customizing their Start Screen and took another registry snapshot afterwards.

A comparison of the 2 snapshots afterwords found only one entry had changed:

[HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-3904176749-3377749892-2175385302-1001\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoChangeStartMenu"=dword:00000001

Ignoring the Security Identifier (which is just for the profile of the logged-on user), this translates to a single change in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive.

I wasn’t able to duplicate the ‘system-wide’ change previously noted (i.e. to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive)… so I’m a bit confused why the result of my experiment was so different.

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Elly

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