Windows 8.1 Charms bar missing and Windows start button not working

I'm just putting this out there because this happened to me and the cause was not intuitive (for me). I figured if people were searching this issue, this would be helpful.

All the sudden, I noticed that my onscreen start button was not functioning. It was there, but mousing over it and clicking it did nothing. The keyboard short cut was working fine. When I went to shut down my machine, I found that the charms bar was not working either.

After doing some searching, I found that the cause was my third party monitor calibration (Spyder Pro). As soon as I set the display back to default, things were working fine.

(In metro screen type 'Color Management'> Click > Profiles > Reset my settings to system default )


I have not tried to recalibrate yet to see if it happens again.

Ridiculous problem, if so, since I've had this laptop for months. There must have been an update that caused this.

 

Definitely a different problem. I don't have Start Menu installed. Mine was the actual Start button on the desktop screen wasn't functioning at all as a button. So this was purely Windows functions that stopped working as a result of some conflict.

 

It was definitely the cause, since the issue was completely resolved after deleting the profile. I have not tried to recalibrate yet, but will.

The only reason I figured it out was that numerous people were having the problem when I was searching on how to repair it. Deleting the color profile was the answer. Now, that is not to say that somehow that became corrupt somehow since it had been working.

Monitor recalibrated again and so far things are working fine. Hopefully it was just a matter of the profile file becoming corrupt.