I recently discovered that I caused an unintended side effect on Windows 10 when deploying a default taskbar for all users.
In my post Intune Deploy Default Taskbar I inadvertently introduced a bug to the Windows 10 Start Menu making it so users can’t customize anything.
The bug is that users can pin programs to the taskbar but they can’t pin anything to the Start Menu and they also can’t change anything in the Start Menu.
The issue does not impact Windows 11 as the way the Windows 11 Start Menu layout uses JSON and the Windows 10 Start Menu layout uses XML, the same XML file that is used for the default taskbar.
I am happy to allow users to customize their Start Menu as much as they want but I do want a consistent user experience for all. Most users likely won’t change anything, but the ones that do want to customize their Start Menu would be blocked.
In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to fix the bug and how to deploy a partial custom Start Menu for Windows 10 using Microsoft Intune.
The Process
- On a source system configure an application group in your start menu and pin the applications in the order you want.
The application group name will also be deployed. I named my application group Company Name for this example but you can make it whatever you want.
I don’t want the custom Start Menu application group to be very intrusive so I will use 1×1 icons for all the common Microsoft applications and I will use 2×2 icon for Company Portal as Company Portal is still new for a lot of people.
- Export the Start Menu layout by running the following PowerShell command
Export-StartLayout -UseDesktopApplicationID -path C:\temp\start-menu.xml
- Open the Start Menu XML file as we will need to make changes to it.