Native Windows 10 Start Menu/Fullscreen Start for Windows 11
Tested on build .376
*While this works right now, it may or may not continue to work in the future. More on this below
*Installing the files required to restore the start menu requires modifying system files, please proceed with caution
Manual Install Instructions
- Backup and replace files with the ones in the "Files" directory. You will need to take ownership of these files, as well as kill startmenuexperiencehost.exe to do this.
- Install registry entry
- Restart Explorer/sign out
*Be sure not to miss any files. The most common bugs when when failing to correctly replace all files are:
- Right click crashing the start menu
- Start Menu not working at all
- Tray icons not working
Known issues:
- Start menu is slow to exit
Discoveries:
Windows 10 notification center/action center can be made restorable and mostly functional, but I am not currently working on it. Please comment if this interests you!
the next thing I want to tackle is the slow exit. I've been probing startmenuexperiencehost.exe and what I've found is that on exit, the thread times out waiting for a broken xaml animation effect called ExpressionAnimantion https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.ui.composition.expressionanimation?view=winrt-22000 The thread hangs, the system tells startmenuexperiencehost.exe to destroy the event, and the menu exits without technically crashing.
The reason I believe the animation is broken right now is that it relies on WRL, or Windows Runtime Library https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cppcx/wrl/windows-runtime-cpp-template-library-wrl?view=msvc-170 but in windows 11, you need to invoke the animation using WinRT https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-apis/ Or at least all of this is as best as I can understand it at the moment! I have no idea at the moment how I would fix this.
Progress on this will be slow on my end for the next few weeks at least, as I am currently in the middle of a lot of real life things at the moment that will be taking my attention away for a while. But that doesn't mean I am not going to post any progress reports at all, so keep checking back occasionally!
cheers everyone!