It has been months since Microsoft’s Start Menu Troubleshooter stopped being available, despite being the number 1 solution to a miraid of problems detailed on the internet.   As far as I can tell, most of the Troubleshooting utilities have been moved into the help system in Windows, which I will detail below.  I  however, frequently run into a problem that does NOT get resolved by the the baked in troubleshooters that are part of Windows 10.  

The problem I frequently run into is the start menu stops working entirely when you click on it, OR when you right-click on the start menu, you get the list of admin tools, but none of them will launch when you try to click on them.   The only failproof work around I could find is to use Task Manager (CTRL – ALT – DEL)  then click on FIle –> Run New Task.   Check “Create this task with admin rights” if needed, but you will need to know the filename and path of the utility you wish to launch.

There are many reasons this problem can manifest itself, but of the many solutions mentioned online, there is one that I have not seen that solves it every time when it happens to me. To say I am a power user would be an understatement, so I do use quite a few utilities and programs to get work completed and to be creative.  This means there are plenty of programs that add context to right-click to “help” me; however, these sometimes are the source of the problem.    Since you right-click when you open the windows start menu, these get evaluated and cause conflict.  The hard part is finding what app is causing the conflict.   Th easiest solution I have found thus far is an old freeware utility that has  been updated to work with windows 10 from NirSoft called ShellExView.   ShellExView provides a table of all extensions loaded with each property and company associated and you can easily enable / disable all or some to quickly identify which utility is the cause of the problem.   In some cases, just disability and reenabling these will fix the problem for you.

Check this tool out, see if it works for you.  Let me know your thoughts, and at the very least, add this to your bag of tricks.