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I'm deploying an unaltered Win10, Enterprise 1709 WIM via SCCM Task Sequence that is configured to deprovision apps using Michael Niehaus's method and it turns off the installation of consumer apps via the registry setting:

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CloudContent" /v ^
  DisableWindowsConsumerFeatures /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

as is discussed in many places including here

In the end, the apps are all removed (or never installed), but the start menu is still showing "broken" tiles for them:

Start menu with "P~microsoft..."

I have not attempted to customize the Start Menu in any way. I just want it to be mostly empty as it is supposed to be when applying these settings.

Why might this be happening and how might I fix it?

Andrew Schulman
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Teknowledgist
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2 Answers2

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TLDR: The "erroneous", "defaultuser0" account/profile is necessary - don't delete it!

I figured out the problem and thought somebody might find it helpful in the future... the "defaultuser0" account is needed!

On other systems (and a different imaging process entirely -- Ghost), I have noticed a defaultuser0 account (in the Admin group!) and profile when I was logged in and installing custom software. As is described in many other places, this account is some kind of bug/error and it should be (and has been) safely delete-able. I've never seen any issues with deleting it.

Apparently, in some situations, deleting it does cause a problem.

Because that defaultuser0 account is apparently reasonably prevalent, one of the last steps in my process ("Task Sequence") that installs a default Windows 10 1709 Enterprise and some software and configures default settings was to delete the "defaultuser0" account and profile if they exist. As soon as I commented out the lines:

net user defaultuser0 /DELETE
Del /F /S /Q %SystemDrive%\Users\defaultuser0

of the completion script that runs just before the final reboot, all the Start menu items went away and I got a start menu with only the Edge, OneNote and Photos tiles as I had expected all along. In addition to fixing the Start Menu, a few other unusual behaviors (e.g. first user to log in must do so twice) that I was going to track down later went away.

Hope this helps someone.

Teknowledgist
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I don't know why this is happening, but I would guess it's just a bug where with the id based method for start menu layouts there is no proper check to see if the app is still present.

To fix it I would suggest using the start menu customization you are currently not using.

Create a start menu template by manually creating the layout you want and then either exporting it with the powershell commandlet:

Export-StartLayout

Details about the usage of the commandlet as well as manual creation and customization of the layout xml can be found here.

Save the file as LayoutModification.xml

Add a task sequence step to copy the file to C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Shell

e.g. a commandline step:

cmd /c "copy ^"<path (works even with spaces) to xml file>^" C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Shell /Y"

if you have some directly accessable share or a disitrbution point based cmd file that copies the xml. This would set up a template for the start menu that users can still modify afterwards.

Syberdoor
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  • Thank you for the suggestion. I found the solution, but you showing that the start-menu could be customized without needing to run `Import-StartLayout` (by just copying the .xml) was useful later. – Teknowledgist Jun 28 '18 at 16:42