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I've been trying to remove the Cortana icon from the start menu for a while now but haven't been successful yet. How do you guys do it?

This is the current look

All I want to do is remove/hide the Cortana icon, not remove its search functionality.

I already tried renaming the Cortana folder in %SystemRoot%\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy

This only broke the search functionality but didn't remove the icon from the start menu.

I also read about moving the %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\TILEDATALAYER folder but it's been deprecated in 1709.

Is there really not a single way to do this?

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    Removing Cortana in its entirety is going to break Windows Search on Windows 10, that is a side effect, of disabling what now is a core component of Windows. You won’t be able to avoid that issue. If you truly want Cortana disabled, use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 13, 2018 at 12:02
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    @Ramhound Maybe there's a way to hide the Icon instead?
    – Lyux
    Jul 13, 2018 at 18:34
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    Have you tried right clicking on the taskbar? You can hide the search/Cortana icon in the context menu, but the search still works when you type in the Start menu.
    – Joseph
    Jan 4, 2019 at 21:17

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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If what you need is to disable Cortana, but keep the search behavior, as in LTSB/C, this can be accomplished either via Group Policy or the Registry (see here), resulting in the default local Search behavior (Cortana name & icon will still show in Start Menu).

  • Cortana and Search are actually SearchUI.exe behaving as one or the other, depending on the configuration in Group Policy or the Registry
  • The icon & name are not configured based on this; Product Policy and Cortana-AllowCortana-Enabled takes precedence with all these tweaks (0 is Local Search, while 1 is Cortana-enabled if not disabled in GP/registry).

    HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions\ProductPolicy is specific to Windows version installed, with Cortana-AllowCortana-Enabled set to 1 in Home/Pro/Ent and 0 in LTSB/C
    • Changing this to 0 will get the desired result, however that value is a kernel protected registry entry, and if modified in a normal session, it's silently discarded; it's only possible to modify it with some additional steps (see here), but once modified, the SPP service will kick in at some point and refresh everything back (disabling SPP is not recommended since that could break other things, such as activation).

The other way is a patch to Cortana.BackgroundTask.dll & Cortana.Core.dll, which are checking for that policy flag (what I used).

Once patched to always return false on the Cortana-enabled check, Search is back:

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  • HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions\ProductPolicy is a REG_BINARY value, not a key with a Cortana-AllowCortana-Enabled value. I don't understand what point this post is trying to make about it. Is there some specific byte in it that you need to modify bits of?
    – AJM
    Sep 29, 2023 at 13:39
  • There is some information about it at geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/ntoskrnl/api/ex/slmem/… - apparently it's used to store license information.
    – AJM
    Sep 29, 2023 at 13:45
  • About the second link in the post (forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/…) - you need to be a registered user to be able to view that post. I don't know if it was publicly accessible when this was posted, but it isn't now.
    – AJM
    Oct 2, 2023 at 10:49
  • Okay... Cortana-AllowCortana-Enabled is an option in a tool called "ProductPolicyEditor" or "Windows Product Policy Editor" that you may be able to download from forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/… . I don't know if you can get the source, or if it just comes as a binary blob. I also don't know if any of the download links are still valid, or if I'd trust the tool or its creator.
    – AJM
    Oct 2, 2023 at 11:56
  • Regarding the ProductPolicy Registry value, the same link tells us: ProductPolicy is protected by kernel - if you write the value - its content remain unchanged although SetValue operation succeeds. To overcome this protection you need to reboot in setup mode
    – AJM
    Oct 2, 2023 at 11:56
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You can do the following in Powershell on Windows 10 v2004:

  • To remove for current user: 
    Get-AppxPackage *Microsoft.549981C3F5F10* | Remove-AppxPackage
  • To remove for all users [admin terminal]: 
    Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers *Microsoft.549981C3F5F10* | Remove-AppxPackage

Functionality can be added back from the store.

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Install latest winget from https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/releases, then run:

winget uninstall cortana

Note: this will uninstall not [just] disable

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