[Fix Windows 10 Bug] If You Change System Time (Zone), Start Menu doesn’t Save Your Changes

Today I’m going to share the most irritating and weird bug present in Windows 10 operating system. It exists in Windows 10 Creators Update, Fall Creators Update and recently released April 2018 Update. I’m sure it’ll also exist in future feature updates as the bug still exists in RS5 Insider Preview builds. I faced this bug/issue in past but the bug resolved automatically after some time. I was not able to find out the culprit at that time but now I know why did this happen.

I have checked this bug in many machines having different Windows 10 feature update versions. Even I tried in virtual machines and I was able to successfully reproduce the bug in all machines.

This bug is related to Start Menu and changing system time or time zone. I never thought that this kind of bug can be related to changing system time. Weird.

Yesterday I posted about a new bug present in Windows 10 April 2018 Update which breaks Start Menu’s left-side toolbar icons customization:

[Windows 10 Bug] Settings Page to Add / Remove Icons in Left-Side Toolbar of Start Menu is Broken

Many people shared that they are not facing this issue. One AskVG reader “Sumit” shared some information which helped me in identifying the cause of this bug and fixing the bug. So big thanks goes to him.

The bug which I’m going to share in this article, completely breaks customization ability of Start Menu. Start Menu doesn’t save any changes you make. If we try to add/remove icons in the left-side toolbar, it doesn’t work. If we try to pin/unpin tiles to Start Menu, it doesn’t work and so on.

This bug appears on clean installation of Windows 10. To reproduce this bug, do a fresh Windows 10 installation. If possible, disconnect your machine from Internet. After installation, change the system time or time zone using Settings app.

Right-click on date/time displayed in Taskbar notification area (system tray) and select “Adjust date/time” option. It’ll open “Time & Language” page in Settings app.

Now change the time zone or system time. By default the time zone is set to “(UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)“. Now change it to some other time zone for example, we changed it to “(UTC+05:30) Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi“.

That’s it. Now try to customize Start Menu appearance. For example, try to remove/unpin all tiles shown in Start Menu’s right-side pane. Right-click on each tile and select “Unpin from Start” option. Yeah, it takes a lot of time, I know.

In previous Windows 10 versions such as Creators Update and Fall Creators Update, as soon as you remove all tiles, the Start Menu might crash. When you click on Start button, you’ll see that all default tiles are back on Start Menu. So no changes are saved.

In April 2018 Update, if you remove all tiles from Start Menu, it saves the changes temporarily. But as soon as you log off, restart computer or restart Explorer, the changes are lost and all default tiles are restored in Start Menu.

So basically the bug is if you change system time or time zone in Windows 10 and try to customize Start Menu, it doesn’t work. Your changes are not saved. You can also try to add/remove icons to the left-side toolbar of Start Menu, it’ll also not work as mentioned in the first bug.

So how to fix it? The fix is simple! Either wait for a few hours after changing the time or time zone and it’ll start working again. You’ll be able to change Start Menu appearance and add/remove icons and tiles.

If you don’t want to wait, there is another solution. Set the time in future. For example, if it’s May 02 today, then set the date to May 05 in your computer and the bug will no longer appear.

Now you can customize Start Menu, add/remove tiles and it’ll not crash Start Menu. All your changes will be saved.

After making changes to Start Menu, restore the correct date/time. Now again you’ll not be able to customize Start Menu for some time. After waiting for a few hours, the bug will be fixed and you’ll be able to customize Start Menu.

You can also try to create a new user profile and it should fix the bug. But if you change time/time zone in the new user profile, the bug will re-appear.

So somehow this bug is related to changing system time and time zone. If you do this, Start Menu breaks. Check it yourself!