Windows 10 Blank Search Bites Production PC
I’ve been reading online about a variety of Windows Search issues recently. On Wednesday, I got bitten myself. The symptom is a blank Start Menu in response to a search string (see screencap below). Fortunately, one of the items I saw from TenForums was entitled “Windows 10 Search shows blank box issue has been resolved.” I must be unusual or lucky. Why? Because part of that story prescribes ending “the SearchUI.exe or SearchApp.exe process via Task Manager.” And that’s the part that set my desktop PC back to rights. Thus, when Windows 10 Blank Search bites production PC, it was easy to fix. I’m glad.
The obvious symptom is a big, blank box any time you type a string into the Start Menu search box. Looks like this.
[Click image for full-sized view. Source: Answers.Microsoft.com]
If Windows 10 Blank Search Bites, Try These Fixes
As a devoted and long-time user of Stardock’s Start10, I don’t use the Start Menu much myself (just to launch UWP apps, in fact). But the recommended fixes do work, and should be tried in this order:
- Restart the affected Windows PC (try that more than once, if the first try fails to fix things). If that doesn’t help, go to the next step.
- Visit TaskManager’s Details tab. If you see either SearchUI.exe or SearchApp.exe, right-click and select “End process” or “End process tree” as applicable.
In my case, “End process tree” for SearchUI.exe did the trick. So far, I’ve only seen this on one of my 10 Windows 10 PCs. But this has been pretty widely reported, so you may see it on one (or more) of your Win10 PCs. And now, if that happens, you know how to fix it!