I'm using a laptop with 4K screen. I have two external monitors attached.

When I click the start button on my built-in 4K screen, the start menu opens just fine. When I click the start button on one of my external monitors, explorer.exe oftenly crashes. This is not 100% reproducible, and doesn't seem to only happen when clicking the start button. It may also happen when hitting the start button on my keyboard with an active window on the external monitors (causing the start menu to display there).

As for settings: I have a start button on each monitor, taskbar is locked, not auto hidden, small buttons enabled, peek disabled, buttons never combined, window buttons only appear on the monitor they're on. I'm on virtual desktop 1 (of 2 total).

The start button then looks to be unresponsive for a few seconds, so I guess it freezes, and afterwards explorer.exe crashes and respawns itself. Very annoying when trying to get some work done, if I'm totally honest.

I'm on Windows 10 x64 (10.0.17134.407) with StartIsBack++ 2.7.2.

Please provide crash details (search View all problem reports->Find Windows Explorer crash details) and/or crash dump if possible

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/wer/collecting-user-mode-dumps

This is still happening, almost daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

Crash reports are not generated, the folder for them remains empty.

When this happens, I need to keep clicking the start button about 10 times until the process is killed and respawned. During this, both task bars disappear. During this it is impossible to, for example, shut down the computer, even by pressing Alt+F4 on the desktop. It forces me to wait for the crash to recover until I can do what I actually wanted to do - shutdown, so I have to wait for a killed process to be respawned, only to kill it again as part of a shutdown. Ironic, isn't it.

Also after a crash, the Night Light feature is reset to normal mode, were this to happen during Night Light hours. That's basically the most irritating about this, as it's a very vibrant visual change on both monitors. It somehow more oftenly seems to crash during these hours (but also during daylight hours!).

Edited February 4, 20215 yr by Thanatica

So it's not a crash, but a hung

Try capturing hung dump for explorer exe either from Task Manager -> Details -> explorer.exe -> Create dump (when taskbar is not responding) or use procdump to catch that - but it may give false positives

procdump -h explorer.exe hung.dmp

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procdump