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I recently encountered the well-known Critical Error: Start Menu and Cortana aren't working message:

Critical Error: Start Menu and Cortana aren't working

Signing out and in again did not help. But I found a solution on a German website:

In Windows, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to show the security screen.

There, press and hold Shift and click on the Shutdown symbol in the bottom right corner of the screen, then Shutdown.

It worked for me – Windows seemed to reconfigure itself during shutdown and during the following boot, during which it even restarted once.

What exactly does Shift do here? Is this documented somewhere?

Community
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Felix Dombek
  • 2,175

2 Answers2

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Pressing the Shift key tells the PC to do a full shutdown rather than a hybrid shutdown.

Source

Josh
  • 5,333
0

I'm using windows 10 v1909 and I do not have fast start enabled (just the default start up). When I do a normal shut down it takes two minutes to fully shut down the computer and I have a SATA SSD drive for Windows. However, if I hold down the shift key down momentarily when I click on shut down, the computer will shut down in 14 seconds. I don't do this for a Windows update.

Ron
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