I had a problem in Windows 10, which meant I couldn’t blog for 4 days: After some updates and other changes, my Windows 10 Start Menu wouldn’t work. Not hardware as Window-L worked and if I login as another user on same machine, there were no issues. It must have been something in my user directory. This is what I tried and what worked. Includes how to remove and restore a user on Windows 10.
This is the problem I was faced with: My Windows 10 has been working excellently since RTM, after one fix to do with Sleep, , although I had heaps of problems with the pre-release versions. Last week I changed the Windows configuration to include Hyper-V which required a reboot but when it rebooted it also did some updates. My system was slow and unresponsive after the reboot and the normal Start Menu wouldn’t work:
Two days before something went haywire with the touchpad and about that time I got a BSOD: The BSOD error I got was something to do with Watchdog, and was probably DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION. A System Restore fixed that.
DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD
For the issues at hand, none of the System Restores would solve the problem. I could see some fixes for this for earlier versions of Windows but none of these were relevant .So I investigated backing up my user data, removing my login and restoring it.
First thing to do was to back up my user data. Whilst the user removal provides an ability to back up user data, I prefer a complete backup of my user data, i.e. c:\User\David. Whilst I could have used xcopy with error parameters or just directly used File Explorer, I prefer robocopy mirroring:
The source was my c:\Users\David and the destination was in c:\Temp.
The /R:0 means retries=0 thus handling any errant copying situations.
To delete an account you need to be logged into an alternative administrative user account and logged out of the target account. There are two paths for actioning removal of a user account. One via the Control Panel and one via the Notifications (right of task bar). Use the Control Panel method as the other does not give you the option to back up the user data.
You may now recreate the account whilst still in Control Panel but it might be safest to reboot back to there, in this other user’s account.
One noticeable absentee is Downloads, which you could just copy from the robocopy backup.
Note that the David folder name may now be slightly different, depending upon what the first login generated.
I then tried logging into the new account but the bugs I got before resurfaced.
This similarly failed. The Start Menu didn’t work.
The temp version is on the the left and the user folder on the right.
I wanted to preserve my Outlook and LiveWriter data settings.
Visual Studio kept giving me some errors on loading although it seemed to work OK for Universal apps:
Looking into the xml error file there were messages such as:
<entry> <record>95</record> <time>2015/08/30 04:21:40.427</time> <type>Error</type> <source>VisualStudio</source> <description>CreateInstance failed for package [Microsoft.SdvMenuCommand.SdvMenuCommandPackage, SdvMenuCommand, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]</description> <guid>{3718CE5A-503F-4C55-8F70-3A4CC34FB1FB}</guid> <hr>80070002</hr> <errorinfo>Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Windows Driver Kit\SdvMenuCommand.dll' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.</errorinfo> </entry>
Restoring the AppData folder can be problematic though. In a lot of cases it may be optimal to reinstall an app after recreating the user account, whilst reusing existing saved data.
PS: After posting this my system developed a further problem: Sleep and Hibernation starting causing BSOD (Internal power error). I rolled back the recent AMD Radeon driver update then disabled auto driver updates. iYou need to disable driver updates as Update will keep restoring the update.)They both now work like a charm!
The version of this driver that works is 15.200.1045.0 dated 22 June 2015. Its the July version that sends things haywire.
There is more to this because Update still updated the driver today ??