I had the same issue. I tried a bunch of things, not sure what made it work, but here's what I did:
I looked through the replies to this post, tried not all but most of the solutions, none worked.
Earlier today and a bit before I started intensely spam trying things, I got the pop up attached below (not 100% if it's the same one the first time because I did not snip, but this was the second time it showed up) My instincts told me that this is related to the windows start menu problems and how changing desktops with four fingers also leads to crashes. I kinda asked chatgpt at this point, which for me was a bit too much information.
I followed some of its steps but they did not work, until when I checked Event Viewer (windows + x -> Event Viewer) and saw that there were many errors and they all had to do with start menu and application crashing things.
I did the following steps, which eventually resulted in the fixing of the problem:
- Restart Windows Explorer
Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager
Find Windows Explorer in the Processes tab
Right-click and select Restart
- Repair Windows UI Components
Open Command Prompt as Administrator
(DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth)
Restart
- Reinstall Start Menu Components
Open PowerShell as Administrator
(Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Windows.StartMenuExperienceHost | Reset-AppxPackage)
Restart
I didn't need to go on after that, the problem was fixed after that restart.
Oh yea btw another tip, don't hesitate to ask chatgpt. Chatgpt doesn't always provide valuable feedbacks/solutions, but since it has such an abundant source of information and knows definitely more than all of us, we could always try to see what it cooks up. And I guess, in my case that was an excellent move! Thx chatgpt ~
I hope this helps :D