Menu doesn't appear

[Guest saintone1]

My phone refuses to show the start menu. When i press the button, I can't see any icons. It says start at the top, so it is trying to access it ok. I can access all programs that are in the short cut bar on my home page. Any ideas how I can fix this?

[Guest madds]

hi, i had the same problem had to do a hard-reset (with phone off hold the two soft-buttons and power on the phone press 0 after black screen).

i think it has to do with homescreens.

[Guest roma0803]

Have you soft restarted your phone? I recognize this since I once used a beta version of xBar to kill Start Menu. For some reason it does not fully load again when pressing Start. Try a restart, that should solve the matter.

Edited December 12, 2005 by roma0803

[Guest madds]

in my case i did several restarts before going to the hard-reset path...

[Guest saintone1]

OK, the hard reset worked.

It took me a while to figure out that it was soft tap on the power button while holding down the two soft keys.

Note: Encase some other users are not aware; a hard reset will totally restore your phone to its original factory settings.

Edited December 13, 2005 by saintone1

[Guest hooperman]

i got this after installing the mac os homescreen for my SP5m. Had to do a hard reset.

[Guest madds]

yes i too had it installed but it as not my current theme when my phone started hanging.

[Guest saintone1]

Ah that is weird because I had recently installed the mac homescreen also.

I thought it might have been something else, but since a few of us had the same problem, I guess I will not install it again.

[Guest chrisc28]

I think I know the problem. Do you all have a storage card in place when installing the Mac skin? It requires a storage card to store the image files.

Edited December 14, 2005 by chrisc28

[Guest madds]

yes i do have a mini-sd on the phone.

maybe it's trying to acess the card to read the start-menu background image this theme installs. (we're getting there :) )

Some times the card maybe being used by the phone on other operations and that way can't read the image file!!!

Edited December 14, 2005 by madds

[Guest Arbait]

The same prob here, gone now after uninstall of OMEGA ONE BATTERY PACK PRO and some homescreen.

[Guest Rapier]

Same problems here after installing some Homescreens. Though, I think it's related to the "Startmenu" application. I got this problem EVERY time if i kill the "start" prgram from Task Manager. After a restart of the phone all OK. As someone pointed out after killing the Start Menu, it is not reloading properly. And this is not depending on the Homescreen in use. I couldn't find a way to properly start the "Start Menu" without restarting the phone. I've tried "appman.exe" that is showing in Task Manager to start the "menu" but i think some command line parameters should be used as well to work. I'll just try to avoid killing this process from Task Manager from now on

[Guest Vulpix]

A new victim to this problem here, couldn't restore the start menu, and had to hard reset my phone... :cry: Please, let's get together and try to solve this problem before it gets another guy as well... I got hit by this bug after changing some wallpapers...

[Guest ElGato65]

OK, this happens to me if I set the start menu to list view rather than grid view. Is the homescreens you guys using doing this? If so you can fix by changeing the registry value for grid view back to 1.

Edited February 19, 2006 by ElGato65

[Guest bjde0b]

This also happened to me but I was able to trick the phone to do what I wanted it to do. All of the information is still there in the start menu you just cant see it. So you need to change the homescreen to something else to get it to show again.

Press:

Start

7

4

enter

then scroll up or down a couple of homescreens

left softkey (done)

then home botton

restart then hopefully it will be fixed

[Guest dez16v]

Yet another victim here!!

Just tried your method but it didn't work for me.

When I press the start button nothing happens, except that start appears at the top of the screen as with previous posters. If I press start again it reads as more at the bottom of the screen but I still cannot view the start menu icons.

So it looks like I need to hard reset like the rest of you.

There must be a way of fixing this with out performing a hard reset every time.

It happened to me after installing some homescreens and plug-ins from the 'JD SKINS' site.

The homescreens are great and I am not saying that they are causing this issue. But after installing the new homeskins I wanted to change to another homescreen and it wouldn't budge.

So I then connected to my p.c. via activesync and deleted all of the 'JD SKINS' homescreens and plugins and tried to use just the windows default screens, but the issue is still there.

Hard reset here I come!! :cry:

dez16v

[Guest mbeattie]

Hey guys, just thought id add to this and say i experienced the problem aswell but with alot of playing around i manaed to do the following

This was on Windows Mobile 5 after installing family guy cab

Click start and there will be a blank screen.

Now click contacts or menu (depending on how much has loaded on your start screen)

this will bring up the option for add speed dial.

Press the add speed dial option and do this a couple of times until it asks you to add a speed dial for settings.

Make sure you take note of what number you assigned for settings.

Then go back the homescreen (or whats left of it)

Press and hold what ever key you assigned to for settings and settings should appear

Now remove whatever homescreen u installed that caused the problem, in my case the family guy one and change your homescreen then reboot.

Sorted, well it sorted it for me.

Hope it sorts it if u get the issue...... hopefully u dont get the issue

[Guest Kaka]

I had the same issue.

For me it was an easy fix. I just pressed the Home key just below the screen lol

Everything now works perfect again

Kaka

[Guest james_h_winters]

snap! i thought i was the only one... hehehe... but you gotta hand it to that guy, that mac osx homescreen is pretty cool... but we got dedicated buttons for media player and stuff, so why bother with the mac like scroll on the bottom of the screen? ;)

[Guest hyedipin]

I once used a beta version of xBar to kill Start Menu

Same thing with me.

What I did was after pressing start (nothing happens) when you hit go back or home button it works nicely back to the home screen.

Mostly, it is the home screen issue..

What you can do is, if you can access your SP through Active Synch, just remove the home screen you are using (or at least move it to you PC) and restart the phone. At this point, when you restart without a home screen it will go back to default settings and will allow you to change your home screen or to access the start menu..

Some themes incldue home screen background, and this is causing the porblems, another issue is a shortcut in Home Screen that's not coming up.. so for this second approach, just browse to you SP again, and make a subfolder IN windows/start menu, and move everything in there. And try now again. You may want to leave ONLY "settings" in start menu, and restart the phone.

Hard Reset for this problem?? Really/?? that's really harsh, I wouldn't want to lose my information in the phone including installed applications!

[Guest thenext1]

It happens to me too many fookin' times, when I've used PIE for a long time... and these times it just takes forever to shut down the phone (i-mate greeter won't go away and the backlight won't turn off) and I have to pull out the battery.

Yesterday I closed the Start application by mistake (using celetask taskmanager), and then the phone began to react very slowly, i.e. took 20-30 seconds to PgUp/PgDn the menu and I could see it drawint the pixels...

I think MANY issues of this phone are related to POOR engineering.

Not software related, but say, If only they could make the START MENU process run at HIGH priority, this would save us the hassle of power-cycling the phone when something sinks the CPU (and with PIE, it happens frequently!!!).

But NO, if a process is hung, instead of terminating it using the task manager (like we do in windows!), we have to power cycle the phone because the START menu won't even show up if not after 2 years of waiting!!!!!!

;)

Anyway I think that unlocking this phone, really kills it .... Everytime I unlock it, after some time of normal usage, it begins malfunctioning, like the old windows 98.

Edited May 10, 2006 by thenext1

[Guest james_h_winters]

i dont know if this will help but this is how it happens for me:

i use binarys task manager to kill apps - wrong. this will also kill the the 'start' program (i think somebody already posted it here) so, that's the source of the problem. i think some homescreens, as well as some other apps, affect the 'start' program so basically, all this happens when the 'start' program is killed.

what i do now, instead of using binarys task manager app is use the built in task manager app>kill all processes>run binarys taskmanager>kill IA task manager (i think that's what it's called)> close the program by exiting>the run oxios hibernate. on my tornado, i get an average of 28MB free memory when doing this. biggest so far (from cold boot) was 29MB, almost 30 ;)

[Guest Chris b.a.r.f.]

Yep, I've had the same problem a couple of times after installing the Mac OSX theme. Nice thing about this theme is that I managed to live without the start menu for a while due to the Shortcut bar at the bottom of the homescreen. Now I've updated to the AKU2 firmware and the problem hasn't repeated itself (touch wood).

Shame that the OSX theme seems to cause some kind of problem - it's otherwise very cool indeed. Maybe it could be the RJShortcut plugin that's causing the prob?

--

Chris

: )

[Guest hyedipin]

BY the way the number sequence given above won't work if you manually edited your start menu applications, because the settings button/folder will be at a different spot and wont correspond to 9 key or any key you pressed. ;)

for kill app, I just stick to the microsoft's own.. I used many different, but after a few suggestions, I think it is the best, because it knows what shouldn't be shut down. just assign a shortuct key to it (i press and hold 3), then hit 7 to close the APP.

On another note, you may wanna give JEYO a try, it also has a good real task manager monitor.

[Guest 4A*e Nyt]

OK, so I must have done this with the OSX home screen but have we come up with a way to restore it without a hard reset? Right now I am just using some Facade homescreen that I jockeyed together from one of the standard ones. Nothing fancy. However, my Start softkey just moves the Start to the top of the screen, shows More at the bottam and gives me no change anywhere else on the screen. Nothing I have tried so far helps.

Thanks for any help.

Curt

Yep, I've had the same problem a couple of times after installing the Mac OSX theme. Nice thing about this theme is that I managed to live without the start menu for a while due to the Shortcut bar at the bottom of the homescreen. Now I've updated to the AKU2 firmware and the problem hasn't repeated itself (touch wood).

Shame that the OSX theme seems to cause some kind of problem - it's otherwise very cool indeed. Maybe it could be the RJShortcut plugin that's causing the prob?

--

Chris

: )