Hi team. I have used the pro version of Windows Repair and had a good success rate with it over the past 6 months since purchasing a license. However, the other day I had a machine in that defied all attempts at repair and I ended up archiving, formatting and reinstalling.
The history of the machine is it is a 2-year old machine running a 64-bit version of Windows 10 home upgraded from Windows 8.1 during the great giveaway. After a failed update (according to the client) the box booted but the start menu and pop-ups invoked by clicking on the volume control, network icon or other Windows-based tray apps would not show. MS Office was also buggered, with an error dialogue showing when clicking the Word (2013) or Excel shortcuts in the taskbar that a dll was missing, corrupted or not designed to run on this version of Windows. The dlls files in question (two) were present but were 0 bytes, so obviously due to be overwritten by the update (perhaps) but not replaced for whatever reason. Replacing these dlls from a known-good machine (mine) running the same version of Windows and Office threw up the same errors.
I tried the four 'usual' repairs for Windows 8/10 start menu breaking but none worked (the DISM fix and the Get app fix run in PowerShell, creating a new user profile and resetting certain registry key permissions). As a last resort I ran Windows Repair, including a SFC and pre-scan variables scans (which found errors and repaired them) except in the case of SFC it found errors in the files but was unable to replace them, which turns out to be a common symptom that many others had with Windows 10 start menu problems.
I thought I'd report this here as like I said, I've had good results in the past with start menu errors running Windows Repair but this time, after two repair runs (I tried another one after some other changes to the OS) I had no luck. Hence I'm very happy with the software and it is a very useful tool for me and worth five times the cost. It just didn't help in this case.
Cheers,
Dave