Problem

• Windows Start Menu automatically closes
• Windows Start Menu unusable
• Windows Start Menu does not open (well, in fact it opens and closes again)

Symptoms of the problem

One of the most annoying bugs in recent years of supporting windows users:

You work on a brand new machine, fresh Windows 11 installation (24H2, 25H2), everything is fine.

But then suddenly, the start menu is dysfunctional:

• if you click on the Windows icon to open the start menu, it opens.
• but half a second later, it automatically closes again. 🤪😱🤢
• even if one quickly clicks on something in the start menu while it is open, it does not work.

Non-working and painful “solutions”

All the “solutions” presented on the internet, where a lot of users reported exactly this problem did not work or were of the sort that one does not want to do anyway. Killing explorer, powershell scripts, sfc, dism, disable antivirus, reset windows, repair install of windows, …

BTW, the suggested “solution” from Microsoft is to create a new user and migrate all data over to the new profile. That works, but is also a total pain.

Root cause

The start menu shows some “recent / recommended items” in its lower section (like files you recently worked with, programs you recently added).

It seems that it can easily block / crash if there is some problem with these items (I am not sure what exactly the problems was, maybe it is when the file is not present anymore, has a strange filename, is some “hidden” system file, or whatever).

Easy and quick solution that worked in my case

I found that in file explorer, on the “start” view, you get the same list of “recent items” presented - luckily without file explorer crashing.

I just removed all “recent items” from the list (right-click on the item, “remove from list”).