Fix Broken Start Menu Search on New Windows 10 Deployments
The start menu search option in Windows 10 is very useful. I didn’t realize how much I relied on it until it stopped working! Start menu search is unusually fragile and can stop working for a number of reasons. A quick Google search finds plenty of possible fixes (see Further Reading below) all of which are likely to work in specific scenarios.
In my case start menu search was broken for all users other than the local administrator account on new deployments. The only fix that worked was copying a folder from the local administrator account to each other account.
Specifically, this folder:
C:\users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Packages\windows.immersivecontrolpanel_cw5n1h2txyewy
Copied to here for each user account:
C:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\windows.immersivecontrolpanel_cw5n1h2txyewy
Not a practical fix for PCs that may be used by many users. Worse, this was happening on newly imaged PCs!
Long story short: if you set CopyProfile to True in your unattend.xml, don’t use audit mode on your reference PC. When building PCs images I have used audit mode on my reference PC for years, mainly to skip the OOBE setup menus you normally have to click through at first boot. In some cases capturing a PC image from audit mode and running sysprep again with CopyProfile set to True in your unattend.xml, may cause the start menu problem on accounts created after image deployment.
Further Reading:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/shell-experience/fix-problems-in-windows-search
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-fix-taskbar-search-not-working-windows-10
http://woshub.com/start-menu-taskbar-search-not-working-windows-10/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/customize-the-default-user-profile-by-using-copyprofile