Windows 10 on Parallels 11 frozen start menu and task bar

There is a fix for this. It involves creating 2 additional users in Windows and copying the good files from one of the new users into the corrupted user.
Search for Article Id 123375 - "Windows 10 Start Menu doesn't work in Parallels virtual machine"...

 

My issue may be more serious. Both keyboard and mouse are unresponsive in the Windows 10 Preview VM. My cursor does not even appear on the desktop. Not sure what triggered this - it was working fine before. Possible too much reclaiming of free disk space in Parallels?

 

Hi Paul, appreciate the suggestion, but I'm not sure why this was assumed. I actually have the latest build (32312) but am having no luck. Are there any KB articles on inability to see cursor in the Windows 10 virtual machine? I didn't see any.

Thanks for the help!

 

Parallels - Are you guys even able to reproduce the problem?? With so many users experiencing it, it seems hard to believe not one Parallels employee has not been having this issue allowing you to debug their machine...

In any case, as it appears you have not pinpointed the problem, releasing updates without actually fixing the root cause and asking us to see if by luck the problem is fixed is not working.... With Version 11.1.1 (32312) the issue still occurs. Problem ID 83421668 reported...

 

FYI, my issue is now resolved. I tried reinstalling Parallels 11, which had no effect. I chalked it up to a Windows 10 problem and proceeded to reset my copy of the virtual machine (hold down Shift key while selecting Restart in Welcome Screen). Up and running again, although I had to reinstall Office 365 and my other apps (personal files were preserved). Oh, and I had to reinstall Parallel Tools from the menu. Whole process took about an hour.

 

I had a frozen start menu after the last update and this worked

 

Had the same issue.
My solution:
- Updating Parallels Tools (Actions > Update Parallels Tools)
- Following the instructions on http://kb.parallels.com/en/123375

 

I already had to redo my Windows 10 install once to get rid of this issue that was happening. Today I upgraded to Parallels 11.1.3 (32521) and after the usual restart my start menu and task bar do not work again. This is on a fresh install of Windows 10 too, not an upgrade to Windows 10.

A little ridiculous having to still go through user profile copying. When will there be a real fix?

 

I'm having the same issue and it was happening so much I had to switch to VMWare despite really not wanting to give them my money after the offshoring garbage they pulled with their desktop products.

I encountered the issue very frequently while setting up multiple copies of Win 10 x64 1511 with different versions of office. I had 7 different linked clones off a core clean patched install of windows. In each copy I was logging in as the same user and installing office via a mounted ISO from MSDN. It seemed to happen reliably when Office 2016 (32 and 64bit versions) completed the install. At the end Office 2016 is supposed to put office icons in the task bar and there's a window prompting you to go online to finish setting up online components or close the installer. At that point the installer was frozen, the Edge icon was hidden (but still had a blank spot in the task bar) and the Office taskbar icons weren't showing. The installer was also frozen along with the taskbar. Clicking the start button would eventually respond after about a minute or so, bult was really only useful to shut down.

At that point even after a restart logging back in as that user would take a long time and the taskbar would still be basically frozen with a hidden Edge icon. The only solution was deleting the user and re-creating it. However, the profile corruption would keep appearing in general use (usually after rebooting) when trying to install further patches or do other customizations. It was happening every few reboots at that point and after wasting hours on the issue I gave up.

This isn't specifically a Parallels problem as the profile corruption is happening fairly commonly on Windows 10 outside of virtualization but Parallels seems to make it much much worse. Really wish this was fixed so I could switch back to Parallels. Their product has a lot better advanced options than Fusion that i could really use, especially for auto-starting headless VMs (Fusion can't do headless without crappy workarounds). I'm setting up a QA workstation with 35 different VMs with combinations of Windows and Office for testing and Fusions limitations are very annoying.

Please fix this issue ASAP.