Bamba wrote:
The search fails in some weird ways. It'll turn up most of my apps but, for example, if I type 'Steam' it doesn't find the application and I need to go digging around in the All Apps list. Not sure what's going on there.
This is a quote from the Ars article I linked on the first page. Maybe that's what bit you?
Ars Technica wrote:
Windows creates a per-user database containing all the entries that are in Start, both the live tile portion and the All apps portion. This database is (inexplicably) maintained by a system service running as the super-privileged SYSTEM identity. And at the time of writing, this database has the oh-so convenient feature of being limited to around 500 entries.
On fresh Windows 10 installs you'll probably never notice the difference, since it'll take some time to build up 500 or so entries. On my main PC with a full install of Office 2016, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, and many more applications besides, I blew right past this number. The result? The All apps view didn't show all my programs. This would be tolerable if that's all that happened. Stupid and annoying, but tolerable, because since Windows Vista, I've launched apps from Start in exactly one way: by typing the name of the app to search for it. I don't really care about All apps at all.
Except that searching breaks, too. For search-to-start apps, Windows appears to use the same database. If that database is incomplete (because you have too many entries) then too bad, so sad; it won't find your apps and you'll have no good way of launching them.
Better yet, even if you reduce the number of apps to below 500 or so, it doesn't fix anything. There's no easy way to make it re-read all the short cuts in the Start menu directory (that still exists, because it's where installers expect to put their icons) to regenerate the database.