Fixing Windows 10 non-responsive start menu

I was just doing my work on windows 10 and for no apparent reason the windows 10 start menu would not respond anymore to either my Windows hotkey on the keyboard or by clicking on the start menu icon in the left bottom corner. This meant no response to the windows key and me typing the application I wanted to start, not being able to shut down my machine, etc. So this gave me some real headaches because the only way I could solve this is do a reset of my PC or just repaving my machine and install windows 10 again.

This has happen to me several times and most of the time after I had been doing some Mobile App development where I build mobile apps that are cross platform. Lately I had to do this for my talk at VS Live in Las Vegas and for that I had to turn on developer mode on my windows 10 machine.

Now I am not sure if his issue is caused by the mobile development I have done or if it is just my SSD drive acting up on me and corrupting certain files on my system. I do know that running the following powers shell command (started in administrator mode of course) solved the problem form me:

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)AppXManifest.xml"}

The option DisableDevelopmentMode does the following:

Registers an existing app package (.appx) installation that has been disabled, didn’t register, or has become corrupted. Use DisableDevelopmentMode to specify that the manifest is from an existing installation and not from a collection of files in development mode.

At least this was a way to solve it for me and hopefully it will work for you as well.