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I have rather unfortunately managed to remove the majority of my start page tiles from Windows 8.1 after running CCleaner. The tiles on the home page were almost entirely removed, and less than half of the tiles present on the Apps page are still there.
This is the first time I have used it on a Windows 8 machine, and I was not expecting this behaviour. It looks as though I have enabled some options that have cleared down all the existing shortcuts, but this can be resovled manually.
After running SFC, a number of applications have returned to the Apps page, many are still missing. Most notably, Visual Studio 2013 and the Microsoft SQL administrator and associated programs. I cannot attach these to the home page.
I need to find a way to force windows to scan through all my installed programs, and to rebuild the tiles on the Apps page for any EXEs found.
I know that these applications are still installed, as I can launch them from their installation directory. For my most used applications, I have re-pinned them manually, but there are a number of other programs which are used less frequently via the text search from the start page, and without tiles on the Apps page, the Search does not find the application.
I run CCleaner all the time on Windows 8.1, so the use of this program, isn't the reason the tiles are gone. What exactly is missing. A screenshot would be helpful. – Ramhound – 2015-06-16T18:53:27.640
Apologies, my question was badly worded. A number of tiles are still there, but only a fraction of what was previously installed. I'm not bothered by the missing home page tiles, but the missing tiles from the Apps page is concerning. Furthermore, my start page search is not returning any applications that are not on the Apps page. All the tiles were there before runing CCleaner, so I'm certain that CCleaner is the cause. – Alex – 2015-06-16T19:01:34.873
When you ran CCleaner what did you wipe exactly? I don't enable certain options in CCleaner. The information likely will be just rebuilt automatically depending on the option(s) you selected. – Ramhound – 2015-06-16T19:03:36.653
Thanks for the post link @Ramhound, I've got SFC scanning now. When I ran CCleaner, it's possible that I enabled shortcut cleaning. I didn't intend to, but I also didn't stop and check over what I had enabled before I started it. This is very much my mistake - I should have paid more attention to the options I had chosen. – Alex – 2015-06-16T19:08:04.740
@Alex You should always click
Analyze
first and check what will be deleted before you clickRun Cleaner
;) – DavidPostill – 2015-06-17T10:06:18.1231@DavidPostill, yeah, I realise this now. I was on autopilot when I ran it. I'm tyring to write a batch script to scan for installed EXEs and rebuild the shortcuts in the Apps page. A momentary lapse of concentration has caused me no end of problems – Alex – 2015-06-17T10:45:39.157