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In the past, I unpinned all tiles from the start menu so that I have just the vertical column of apps.

Shortly after the 1809 update on February 4th, 2019**, these tiles came back, many of them empty: They have a downward arrow like they are downloading and most of them have a hint A great new app is coming.
But nothing is coming, and if I unpin them all again, they will reappear after one or more system boots.

enter image description here

Other info that may be relevant:

  • (Right) Clicking the titles with the downward arrow does nothing.
  • The MS Store app settings have App updates on and Live titles on. I never use(d) the Store app.
  • The Downloads and updates section in the MS Store App list for recent activity does not have a one-on-one match with the reappearing tiles (either all of them or those that do not have the downward arrow)
  • As you can see from screenshots the OS language is Dutch. Keyboard is US.
  • Recent updates according to the old control panel (the list does not go further back than that??):

enter image description here

I hesitate to do reinstalls (as e.g. suggested here), so I'm asking here first:

What can I do to have these start menu tiles disappear?


** My company manages updates through WSUS and they had some issues with that, which made this update late:
enter image description here

3
  • I don't know the solution, but it's useful to report what you've reported here to Feedback Hub on your PC. Look in the Windows Update history and see which specific updates were applied on 4 February, and let them know that too. It might only happen in the specific language / keyboard you're running, so mention that as well. Feb 26, 2019 at 16:40
  • "Shortly after the 1809 update on February 4th ..." - Are you talking an 1809 monthly cumulative update or the 1809 update itself? There was no cumulative update released on February 4th, 2019. So which update are you talking about specifically?
    – Ramhound
    Feb 26, 2019 at 17:31
  • @Ramhound See update
    – Jan Doggen
    Feb 27, 2019 at 8:17

1 Answer 1

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The issue is resolved - it seems to require two steps.

A colleague had very similar problems after the update. He first re-registered the start menu with the Powershell script from the How To Re-register Start Menu In Windows 10 blog post*:

Get-appxpackage -all *shellexperience* -packagetype bundle |% {add-appxpackage -register -disabledevelopmentmode ($_.installlocation + “\appxmetadata\appxbundlemanifest.xml”)}

That did not help him, however. He then found the Windows 10 Start Menu Keeps Resetting Itself Back to Default Settings (Group Policy) Reddit post which describes the Group Policy setting Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy\Continue experiences on this device as a possible cause:

If the above Group Policy is set to 'Disabled', when the computer is booted—used or left idle for around ten minutes—then restarted, the Start menu gets reset back to the default out-of-box Start menu (I.E. All the user's pinned tiles are removed and the default tiles and layout replaces them, including Candy Crush games, etc.. Quite a few programs are also then shown in the 'All apps' menu as 'New'. If you set the Start menu back up again, it will keep doing the same thing and resetting itself back to the default tiles/layout until the Group Policy is set to 'Not configured' instead.

This group policy was then changed from disabled to not configured in our company wide settings. That solved his issues.

At the time that I wrote this question, that policy was effective for me too, but obviously did not fix my issue.

I have now also executed the Powershell script, and together these seem to do the trick:
My Start menu has now been behaving as wanted (no extra tiles) for several days.

* Run in an administrative Windows PowerShell window

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