Windows 11 Update May Prevent Start Menu from Opening

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Image: Microsoft

Windows 11’s Start menu may fail to open following a recent update.

As detailed in an advisory on Microsoft’s technical documentations site, the Start menu “might not open” in the latest version of its operating system because of a problem with KB5014668. This update was released in late June and introduced a handful of new features and improvements, such as search highlights, albeit with some apparent problems.

Microsoft has clarified that this issue should only affect a few devices, although the problem may also manifest in more recent updates.

After installing KB5014668 or later updates, we have received reports that a small number of devices might be unable to open the Start menu. On affected devices, clicking or selecting the Start button, or using the Windows key on your keyboard might have no effect.

Resolution of the problem comes by way of Known Issue Rollback (KIR), a feature that allows Microsoft and organizations to “quickly return an impacted device back to productive use if an issue arises during a Windows update.” There could be a bit of a wait involved, however.

Please note that it might take up to 24 hours for the resolution to propagate automatically to consumer devices and non-managed business devices. Restarting your Windows device might help the resolution apply to your device faster. For enterprise-managed devices that have installed an affected update and encountered this issue can resolve it by installing and configuring a special Group Policy. The special Group Policy can be found in Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – KB5014668 220721_04201 Known Issue Rollback – Windows 11 (original release). For information on deploying and configuring these special Group Policy, please see How to use Group Policy to deploy a Known Issue Rollback.

The KB5014668 update has also reportedly been problematic for failing to install for some users. Some users have called this ironic, as the update is partially meant to fix “an issue that might cause an upgrade to Windows 11 (original release) to fail.”

Windows 11 will celebrate its first anniversary in a couple of months. The OS originally launched on October 5, 2021.

Source: Microsoft

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Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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