Question Four calamities at once: Menu, Cortana, Office and Edge won't work.

[rsessums]

I have had four annoying things happen to my Windows 10 computer all at the same time and I cannot get them corrected:

1. The Cortana search box at the bottom left of the screen no longer works.
2. The FIRST time I try to use the start menu is opens but it grayed out and unusable. I click on the desktop and back on the start button and then the menu is fine.
3. MS Edge opens but then quickly closes before it loads anything.
4. MS Office 2016 apps will not open.

All of these things happened on the same day. My wife was the user at the time this started and there were no changes made to the hardware/software, etc.

I have tried a LOT of remedies to no avail. So far I have:

1. Scanned with MalwareBytes.
2. Scanned with Defender, AVG, F-Prot, Kaspersky and none of these detected any viruses.
3. Ran SFC /scannow which says that it found corrupted file but could not repair/replace them.
4. Did disk diagnostics with no errors found.
5. Restored the disk from my backup using Acronis 2019.
6. Reset all the MS Edge settings using the add/remove menu.
7. Booted to the install disk and ran sfc /scannow and got the same error message as before: found corrupted files but could not repair/replace.
8. Ran Windows update to confirm that I have all of the latest updates.

I have run out of things to try. Can any of you suggest anything else that I could do short of a full install?

I thank you for any advice that you can give......

 

[wpgwpg]

Did you just have the one backup? If that's the case, it sounds like you'll have to save any data you don't want to lose and reinstall Windows.

 

[rsessums]

Did you just have the one backup? If that's the case, it sounds like you'll have to save any data you don't want to lose and reinstall Windows.

I have a few backups: Four days worth of a full system backup using Acronis 2019 and a real-time ongoing backup of all of MY files using Carbonite.

 

[wpgwpg]

OK, try restoring from your oldest backup. Hopefully that one was made before things got corrupted.

 

[Colif]

See if this can fix SFC

right click start button
choose powershell (admin)
copy/paste this command into window:
Repair-WindowsImage -Online -RestoreHealth
and press enter

SFC fixes system files, second command cleans the image files that SFC uses to fix the system, re run SFC after this command is finished. It should be able to fix the corruption now.

If it asks for source, we worry about that in next post.

 

[rsessums]

Thanks for all of the suggestions.... as it turns out, my Acronis full backup from four days ago did the trick. I restored the entire C drive and then restored the few files I had created since that backup was made via my real-time backup at Carbonite. I only had a few of those recent files to restore - I realized at that time just how much of my stuff is either in the cloud or on my phone and not even part of my PC backup plan. Thank goodness for my regular backups!

Again, thank you for the helpful suggestions.