Those Bugs in Windows 7: Why my Start Menu settings are not right!?

Bugs › Windows

After additional testing, it is confirmed that this bug also exists in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Right click taskbar, click Properties.
  2. Switch to Start Menu tab, click Customize button.
  3. In Customize Start Menu dialog, make changes (anything is fine). When finished, click OK button (In Windows XP, you need to switch to Advanced tab first before make any changes).
  4. Then, click Cancel button in Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog, which is the top level dialog.

OK. Now open Start Menu, you can see there is no change at all at this time. But, if you open Taskbar and Start Menu Properties -> Customize Start Menu dialog again, you will be surprised to see that the changes you just made have been all saved, even though the Start Menu does not appear to be changed!

This is a classic multi-dialog data saving problem. The current situation is that, when you clicked OK button in Customize Start Menu dialog, all the settings were actually being saved. However, the next step of clicking Cancel button will cause the new settings not to be applied immediately. So…if I want to apply these settings, How?

Well, there are 3 ways:

  1. Open Taskbar and Start Menu Properties -> Customize Start Menu dialog again, change something you want, then change it back and click OK button to exit from all these dialogs. After this, all the settings will be applied in no time.
  2. Just restart your computer directly.
  3. Open Windows Task Manager and kill explorer.exe process (not recommended, though. It might have unexpected results)

I regard this as a bug, because if you performed the reproducing steps above, the actual settings and the interface displays are not consistent. Also, in my opinion, the result of clicking Cancel button should be the action of discarding all the changes, not the one of discarding one part of changes while saving another part. The latter action usually can cause some inconsistent and weird results. In a word, this is a violation of atomicity (apply all settings or discard all settings).