So, this morning, I got a reply from Microsoft support in regards to my start menu not working after the anniversary update. Their "Official Word" [bleah] is that the start menu problem I am experiencing is categorically not their fault. I need to uninstall Malwarebytes, Avast, ASC, Dropbox, AND JRiver MediaCenter. "These applications do not work with Windows 10. You need to take your issues up with the developers of these products"
We swear, it isn't us. It is mere coincidence that
all of those applications (and many others), which work fine on previous versions of Windows, and even those that don't hook into the explorer.exe process at all, somehow manage to deadlock it. Windows 10 works perfectly when you remove all of the applications you want to use it with.
And it absolutely has nothing to do with the fact that we fired our entire QA department midway through the development of Windows 10. Nope. Not at all. Nothing to see here.
Even that nonsense would be somewhat excusable if they'd published
something for developers saying: Here's how you support Windows 10 without making explorer.exe deadlock. If that document exists somewhere buried on MSDN, I don't know where it is (and, apparently, neither does DropBox, Avast, Adobe, Valve, and a ton of other developers).
Nonsense. The Anniversary update is shaping up to be a crapshow. They
broke all the webcams. They
broke their own controllers. It
bluescreens when you just simply plug in a Kindle. Oh, and they
forgot to include a whole set of required DLLs and broke PowerShell. How in-all-that-is-holy did
that make it through QA? Oh yeah, you fired them.