How to Fix the Broken Start Menu and Taskbar in Latest Windows 11 Builds

Microsoft offers workaround for Start menu and taskbar bug

Microsoft has released new Windows 11 preview builds for both the Dev and Beta channels a few hours ago, and in addition to further polishing and optimizations, they also come with a bug that wasn’t included in the known issues at first.

This glitch causes the Start menu and the taskbar to become unresponsive, with Microsoft acknowledging the problem after the first users installed the preview builds and reporting it online.

“Recently, Windows Insiders in both the Dev and Beta Channels began reporting that Start and Taskbar were unresponsive and Settings and other areas of the OS wouldn’t load. We quickly discovered an issue with a server-side deployment that went out to Insiders and canceled that deployment. If you were impacted by this issue, you can use the following steps to get back into a working state on your PC,” the company explained.

Microsoft has therefore released a workaround for the impacted devices, and applying it only takes a minute, as it just comes down to deleting a registry entry from the Task Manager.

How to fix the bug

Microsoft explains that users need to launch Task Manager by pressing CTRL + Alt + Del (given the taskbar and the Start menu are both unresponsive), and then click the “More details” option at the bottom of the screen.

Go to File > Run new task, and then type cmd to launch a Command Prompt window. Next, you need to paste the following command in the Command Prompt window you just launched:

reg delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\IrisService /f && shutdown -r -t 0

Hit enter, wait for your computer to reboot, and then everything should be working correctly, with both the taskbar and the Start menu to run as you’d expect them to run in the first place.