Start Menu, Explorer, Taskbar, Settings all crash

July’s update managed to break almost every core Windows feature simultaneously. A XAML package registration race condition caused File Explorer, Start Menu, Taskbar, Settings, and Windows Search to crash or fail to load entirely. Neowin’s headline said it best: “Microsoft finally admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken.” The workaround was a PowerShell command to re-register XAML packages — the kind of thing you’d expect from a Linux distro, not the world’s most popular desktop OS. When your operating system needs command-line surgery to display a Start menu, something has gone deeply wrong.