How to Freeze Start Menu Layout in Windows 10

On a shared PC, that is being used by many users either in your home or an office, the usual complaint is that someone changed the settings – the desktop background, the browser settings, the Start Menu layout or something else that can be customized in a Windows PC. And then the IT guys have to spend a lot of their time in fixing these small settings back. As far as the Start Menu is concerned, you can easily freeze it to a custom Start Menu layout using a simple Windows policy setting. Here is how:

  1. First of all manually customize the Start Menu of a PC to your desired look and feel. Once this is done, we can save the layout of the Start Menu and force it to use the same layout from now on.
  2. Press the hotkey Win+R, type powershell and press Enter. This will start the PowerShell CLI window.
  3. In the powershell window give the command : Export-StartLayout -path D:\Start\StartMenu.XML. Of course, you can change the path and filename of the XML file. This is the Start Menu layout file.Windows 10 Lock StartMenu Layout
  4. Press the hotkey Win+R, type regedit and press Enter to open the Windows Registry Editor.
  5. In the Registry Editor, open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer.
  6. Right-click on the right-side pane, choose New → Dword (32-bit) Value to create a new DWORD value. Give this value a name LockedStartLayout and set its value to 1.
  7. Once again, right-click on the right-side pane, choose New → Expandable String Value to create a new expandable string value. Give this value a name StartLayoutFile and set its value to the full path of the Start Menu XML layout file.Windows 10 Lock StartMenu Layout
  8. That’s it, you are all set. From now on, nobody can change the Start Menu layout in your PC unless the policy settings are altered by a system administrator.
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