Windows 10 tile layout in Start Menu resets after reboot

Note: I will be answering this question myself to help other people who come across this problem in the future. Feel free to submit your own answers if you want, I know that other people have had this same problem, but caused by a different issue than the one I had.

I have just installed Windows 10 on a new computer, and when I move or unpin tiles in the Start Menu, they are reset to their original location after rebooting the computer. If I attempt to pin a new tile to the Start Menu, Windows Explorer crashes. How can I fix this problem?

Solution 1:

If you are running Windows 10 Pro, the first thing to check is that the Start Layout group policy setting is not set under Administrative Templates\Start Menu and Taskbar. This setting is under both User Configuration and Computer Configuration.

The actual problem for me was caused by changing the timezone. Since this was a new install of Windows, and now since the Creators Update Windows does not ask you for the timezone during the install, I had to manually set the proper timezone in the Settings app. In my case, I set the timezone from UTC-8 to UTC-5, so back 3 hours. Due to a possible caching problem with the Windows 10 Start Menu, any changes I made to the Start Menu would not be saved. Whenever explorer.exe was restarted (from a Windows reboot or through the Task Manager), any changes would be reset.

The solution was simply to wait 3 hours for the time to catch back up to the original time before the timezone change. I verified this by changing the timezone from UTC-8 to UTC-5, verifying that it broke the Start Menu, waiting 2.5 hours, checking that the Start Menu was still broken, waiting another hour (now 3.5 hours), and verifying that the Start Menu was now fixed. I did not do anything else to the computer during this time.

Therefore if your Start Menu is not updating and you recently changed the timezone, just wait for a few hours and it will fix itself.

Edit: As this seems to be fairly popular, it would be nice if someone forwarded this bug to a Microsoft employee :)

Solution 2:

Deleting key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CloudStore\Store\Cache\DefaultAccount

helped me out

Ive found more info in english here : https://news.softpedia.com/news/how-to-reset-windows-10-fall-creators-update-start-menu-and-clear-all-tiles-519699.shtml

Basically its a tree thats responsible for live tile caching. Deleting this key will reset live tile cache and fix problem with different timezones.