Upgrade from Win10 leaves crippled system

After adding a TPM2 chip to my motherboard, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my Win 10 Pro OS to Win 11. It took around 3 hours. However, I was left with a series of issues, the main ones are:
- An unresponsive taskbar. It sometimes disappears completely. If I'm quick, I can get Start to appear, though important functions don't work.
- If I get Settings to show, it won't allow System to appear, so I'm unable to try Troubleshooting or Recovery. I can't therefore bring up the OS in Safe Mode.
- I'm dependent on Task Manager for running tasks, but only if they're available. I brought up Control Panel, but that had the same issues with non-functional options as Settings.
- SFC and DISM found no issues.
- I'm unable to revert to Win10, as I don't know how to locate that function. I backed up my C drive before the upgrade. Would restoring that allow a complete reversal of the upgrade?

if you can access Task Manager, you can launch command prompt via "Run new task" and type and check the box below it to run as Admin. then run the command in Option 3 in the tutorial linked. i would go back to windows 10 (via that command), uninstall any patch programs (and anything similar to Explorer Patcher, StartAllBack, etc.. just for good measure). then run the upgrade again. i'm assuming its an incompatibility somewhere, but its hard to know without knowing all mods made to your system prior to the upgrade.

Thanks for your reply. Very helpful. I used PowerShell and it's running now.
I still want to upgrade, but I need to find out first what caused the incompatibility.

Perrorist said:

- An unresponsive taskbar. It sometimes disappears completely.

Click to expand...

I have this disappearing taskbar problem too in 24H2 though it is intermittent and only occurs on resume from Sleep. You can see my posts on this here: Severe Open-Shell Problem on Win11 24H2 When System Resumes from Sleep. Any fix?

After a lot of testing I decided that the problem with no taskbar is really a problem with Windows. Some of my tests included not having Open-Shell launched at all and occasionally the same issue would show up with Windows 11 own native Start Menu Button if, as part of testing, I didn't have Open-Shell launched at all – so this is not an Open-Shell issue at all.

As things stand I wouldn't be using Windows at all if it wasn't for Open-Shell so I'll just have to live with the issue and hope Microsoft are aware of it and provide a fix in the future.

With Open-Shell running to get out of the mess of no taskbar I have to right-click the Open-Shell Start Menu Button and select "Exit". This closes Open-Shell and immediately the taskbar appears (as if there was no problem at all). To get Open-Shell running again I found that if I use the taskbar Search function and start to enter the search-word "start" then I get an offer to launch "Open-Shell Menu Settings" so I click on that, OK the GUI that turns up, then Open-Shell immediately launches and I'm back with a fully functioning taskbar and with Open-Shell working as normal too.

As part of trying to find a solution this I created a batch file that kills Explorer and then immediately restarts Explorer again. This worked in as much as it would get the taskbar to appear though there was an issue that one of my much used apps would have its icon missing from the System Tray. To get around that I would have to end that task in Task Manager then relaunch the app to get the System Tray icon back. That I thought too messy, so just soldier on with getting the taskbar to appear by going the 'Open-Shell Exit route' as described above.

The first thing I thought to try was to stop and restart Windows Explorer, but I couldn't find it in the list of processes, nor could I start a new process for that function.
I'm more or less convinced that the problem is with Win 10. The install is now 5 years old and has probably accumulated a fair few issues. I'll have to install a new copy, I think, before trying another upgrade.

if you've already upgraded once and you're going to do a fresh install anyways, just backup your C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository folder and install windows 11 fresh. install drives manually in device manager browsed to that folder you backed up.

So you're saying, install the drives using Device Manager and point them to the backed up repository for the drivers?

correct. after a fresh windows 11 install (if you're going to reimage it anyways...)

Thanks, that's good thinking. I'll take that path.