Forum Discussion
June 9th Update - Buggy Start Menu Category View
Hi,
The latest cumulative update from June introduced a new Start menu and disrupted its behavior in certain situations. Normally, it would allow you to set one of the following view options: Category, Grid, or List. This setting should have persisted. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Under certain circumstances, Windows keeps reverting to the Categories view, regardless of your previous selection.
According to https://james-rankin.com/articles/quickpost-windows-11-start-menu-reverts-to-category-view-after-group-policy-refresh/?trk=public_post_comment-text, this issue stems from a bug in combination with specific GPOs.
My conclusion is that Microsoft introduced a bug in the June update. Surprisingly, little information is available when searching for this issue online. This seems particularly true when reviewing the GPOs mentioned in the article, which include certain advertisement and tracking options. I am surprised by how little is documented about this online.
Personally, this only affects my company machines due to one or two of those GPOs, I suspect. I wonder how many others in this community are also affected by this bug.
5 Replies
Our enterprise domain devices are currently experiencing the same issue since June when the new Start Menu began rolling out. More devices are receiving it now and also seeing the view revert back to Categories at random. The strange thing is, even when changing the view then running a gpupdate /force, nothing happens, so I'm still not fully convinced this is a GPO issue. I had my Start Menu open earlier, and I saw it change in real-time back to the Categories view. Not sure what Microsoft is doing about this, but it absolutely needs to be fixed ASAP.
According to this Article, it seems like Microsoft tries to fix the issue in an upcoming Update:
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/kb5101684-windows-11-insider-release-preview-build-26100-8968-24h2-and-26200-8968-25h2-july-20.48251/
Quote:
Start menu
This update improves reliability of Start menu view preferences, ensuring your selected view is retained.
Rather than resetting the view again, identify the policy that is writing the value. Run `rsop.msc` while affected, navigate to the Start/Explorer policy results, and note the winning GPO and its precedence. An administrator can then set just that policy to Not Configured for a test OU and refresh the policy. If the view then survives a refresh, the remediation is to correct the policy—not to change each user's Start view locally.
Hi, this does sound like a policy interaction if the Start menu view resets after Group Policy refresh. I’d test with a local unmanaged account or a machine outside that GPO scope to confirm. If it only happens with policy applied, capture the build number, applied Start policies, and repro steps, then send it through Feedback Hub and your normal Microsoft support channel.
This bug was present even before the recent Updates! And yes, it REVERTS every time there is an update to the Group Policy... Open an elevated Terminal and use the "gpupdate / force" command... After that open the Start Menu.
EXPECTED: List / Grid view is in place (whichever was set before)
ACTUAL: It reverts back to Category view!
