What type of computer are you running Windows 10 on? I've had multiple computers running Windows 10 (even a low end tablet) and I've never seen this start menu issue. I've also not seen it on any computers in a retail shop.

Not saying it doesn't happen or you're lying but I've never seen it and I've used many low and high end Windows 10 computers so I'm curious what the cause could be.

I'm on a custom build for gaming (ryzen 1600, 16gb ram, ssd) and routinely I will click the start menu and it will flash open, only to close and the computer will churn before it opens again. I think it's crashing periodically and restarting itself.

Pretty bare install. Chrome and Steam are the only programs running most of the time. I disabled cortana and one drive, though.

I have a similar build as you: 16gb ram, ssd, intel onboard graphics and I have the same issue (Cortana is also disabled for me as well as OneDrive). I didn't start noticing it until a few months ago at most, the menu used to be much more responsive. Perhaps a recent(ish) update broke it?

Acer intel i7 2.50ghz ddr 8gb here, no ssd; the menu opens in about 0.02 seconds. OneDrive uninstalled (not disabled); I don't know about Cortana (haven't seen it anywhere so it doesn't bother me)

High end laptops, desktops and servers, both physical and VM (I also get the same experience with Windows Server 2016).

The only thing I can think of is that I disable all telemetry / cortana / web search / one drive features (through registry settings, not DNS). It is possible that Microsoft doesn't test properly their OS with all the features mentioned in the article switched off and that the Start menu blocks on something. But I consistently observe this on multiple machines.

Cortana is explorer to some extent, they are breakingly integrated. If you are killing cortana + all cortana services/backend via regedit or another method it will certainly crash continuously.

In your setup you would need to be using a start menu replacement.

From what I read it might be a Cortana issue because for some unfathomable reason their normal app search on the start menu is now "Cortana", but if I understood correctly Cortana isn't even available in all regions? I don't know how this is supposed to work - is there a cut down search service that is called Cortana but isn't Cortana? I have no idea and Microsoft docs on this are terrible.

I am from Brazil, Cortana is not available here... (at least when I checked last time).

And Start Menu behave as described in all machines I tried, it takes forever to load, and sometimes still closes again...

And its search system is really crappy.

Now every time Win10 user ask my help, I install for them "Agent Ransack"

Isn't "Everything"[0] a better Windows search replacement overall?

[0] http://www.voidtools.com/

Random lagging on Windows is common.

My new Dell laptop often lags when opening the start menu. My previous lenovo stuttered from time to time. My HP before that would block for 200-700 ms every 30 seconds, causing lost keystrokes, until I uninstalled HP power manager.

I guess signature editions and Surface are better.

When I have the start menu lag, it's because the search service isn't working. If the start menu takes 3 seconds to show that correlates 100% of the time with the search function not working either.

So just reset the search function or something then?

I have googled solutions like this for months. Happy to try one more.

I don't have a general solution but for older versions of windows there was latency mon or something (similar exists for Windows 10 but I have forgotten the name). This might help you identify the culprit.

The way I use it is I start latencymon (or similar), Running that I'll then stop applications one by one and see if the latency spikes disappears.

If that doesn't help next I'll stop services one by one.

If it is software related you should find it this way - usually Windows is quite stable in itself and it is "just" a misbehaving driver.

What you're describing sound like a bad driver for something. I had something like this, traced it with xperf, it was an Ethernet driver.

Yes, this shouldn't happen, somebody botched platform validation.

That's my experience as well. Modern Windows is mostly solid but the vendor drivers can be hilariously bad sometimes.

Really? I have seen start menu taking 5 seconds to load up all the time.

Same. About 50% of the time, I am only allowed to enter 1 character in the search, but no more. Sometimes 2. A reboot is the only thing that fixes it for me.

And sometimes it doesn't return search results with apps that I know are installed.

When I had crazy crappy Win10 start menu problems, it was actually fixed by an SSD firmware update (Samsung 850 EVO I think).

I really didn't expect it to work, and I was running out of things to try after the umpteenth windows re-install and many Memtest runs