Why your new domain user's start menu's are empty

Why your new domain user's start menu's are empty

You've just setup your new AD DS instance, configured your enterprise's domain and configured roaming profiles through your GPOs. You add your first client to the new domain and all is well until you find a start menu looking like this:

![start01](https://grab.aaronduce.com/i/2019-07-05_08_45_51-Window.png)

or this:

![start02](https://grab.aaronduce.com/i/2019-07-07_23_34_30-.png)

None of your installed or deployed applications, and in some cases any of the stock UWP apps appear for clients.

You ponder on the thought for many days, changing configuration settings and reversing your actions to no avail to your clients, yet all that separated you and your functional start menu for your clients was in fact just the difference between a 1 and a 0.

From Windows 10 v1607 onwards, Microsoft changed the documentation for deployment of Roaming Profiles with a short one liner stating that you must now add a registry key value for the start menu to override defaults and work correctly with roaming profiles. Otherwise, it will not work or query your local systems default start menu and/or present the applications that have been installed on the client.

The fix for this is simple though, and can be done locally on the machine in regedit or through a registry deployment on your GPO (applied with a gpupdate /force).

- Apply a REG_DWORD key called SpecialRoamingOverrideAllowed in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
- Set the value of the key to 1

Now restart the computer after setting or deploying the key and your clients should now have the normal start menu back with all their applications.

Thank You! This solved an issue we've been scratching our heads about for a long time.