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Critical Error – Start Menu and Cortana Aren’t Working

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Jan 9, 2016

CPOL
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Critical Error – Start Menu and Cortana aren’t working

Introduction

In the middle of December of 2015, I got a message informing me that Cortana and Start Menu of my Windows 10 stopped working. The message looked as follows:

So, after a couple of minutes, I found a solution, but I have to apply it in several steps:

  1. The commandlet sequence must be executed with elevated rights.
  2. The following script doesn't run as expected on my machine:
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode 
	-Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
And a simple solution turned into a sophisticated one. Unfortunately, I don't remember all the errors that occured during scripts execution, but the thing is... a variable $_.InstallLocation was undefined. So, I rewrote script as follows:
   $manifest=(Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.WindowsStore).InstallLocation + '\AppxManifest.xml'
   Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {
      Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $manifest
   }
Finally it worked. So I restarted my computer and noticed that Start Menu is working. I almost forgot about this error 'til a day before yesterday: it happened again! I just gather all the commands in one script and placed it on the desktop. So if one might find it useful, I attach an archive of the script.