CRITICAL ERROR – Start Menu and CORTANA aren’t working. We’ll try to fix it the next time you sign in.
Yeah that is not what I wanted to see when I turned on my computer.
I signed out, signed back in, didn’t work.
I shut down and started back up (repeatedly) and still didn’t work.
Couldn’t get most of my programs to work.
WTH man!? It was JUST working.
So I did like I always do (being the amazing, brilliant mind that I am) and I googled the error to see what I could find. At first I found typical Microsoft answers of “Ghee we don’t really know why this happens but we are working on it”. People said:
- Make a new account. (but very low success rate and I didn’t feel like it)
- Sign out and sign back in. (which is what the error even says, I tried, twice, didn’t work, found NO ONE that had it work actually)
- Start in safe mode. (meh couldn’t see how that would help since I hadn’t changed my configuration at all)
- Uninstall the evil, horrible Avast antivirus. (one guy SWEARS it was all that worked, but I use Avast on all my systems and love it)
- Uninstall ALL antivirus software because it is ALL evil. (no way in hell am I doing that, clearly I surf way too much porn to have that safe, and I am pretty sure that guy is the guy who writes the viruses anyway)
- Restart and press F8 while re-starting to boot in safe mode. (which isn’t how you boot in safe mode in windows 10, as far as I know, but what the hell.)
So what worked?
Yeah so I restarted (NOT shut down, but RESTART) and pressed F8 while it was re-starting. I have no idea if the pressing of F8 was what did it, or if restarting actually triggered whatever update needed to be done but it gave me the windows is configuring your computer screen which made me hopeful. It went through the update process (we are ALL familiar with that right?) and when it booted back up BOOM no more critical error, start menu and programs work. Not sure about Cortana, don’t use her, she seems kinda snotty tbh. 😀
Anyway Microsoft wouldn’t let me reply to the post, and well I don’t register to tech forums to post one answer and get a ton of spam, so I figured I would actually blog about it. Shocking……