Classic Shell is a program that reverts your newer than XP Start Menu to how it was in XP.

The developer finally got tired of MS borking it with Win10 updates and stopped further development of Classic Shell. http://classicshell.net/

Fortunately, the program is so great that it withstood the breaking abilities of MS and is still going strong. There's also a link to the continued version done by development volunteers on GitHub under the name Open Shell on the page of the link I provided above.

I have not tried the Open Shell version since the Classic Shell version works so well for me.

Why MS didn't give users the option to keep it XP style is baffling to me. It's a far better way to navigate to where you need to go.

Here are the settings that I promised from a thread in the General Discussion forum. I didn't post the settings for Language because it's unnecessary.

Start Menu Style


Controls


Main Menu


Main Menu CONTINUED


General Behavior


Search Box


Menu Look


Skin-I Chose Metro


Start Button


Taskbar


Windows 10 Settings


Customize Start Menu


Context Menu


Sounds

Thank you Windy, very comprehensive settings there. I'm sure that's going to be very useful for not only myself but others, too.

OpenShell looks like it's also worth having a go at, I think. At least, from what I gleaned on GitHub.

I reviewed a number of utilities that looked to return the Start Menu to Windows 8 for an organisation with a reasonable number of desktops / laptops (in order to minimise disruption / training requirements) - these included Classic Shell, Start8 and Startisback (along with a couple of lesser known options).

I moved on before the upgrade was undertaken but had determined that Startisback (now Startisback++ for Windows 10) was a good fit. Indeed I purchased several copies for my own use, and it is the Startmenu on my home machines. $5 for a 5-user licence (lifetime updates). That was about 9yrs ago, its a bit more expensive now but still a great product!

I corrected a couple of things I noticed recently and finally had time to fix.

I forgot to add the rest of the settings under Main Menu and is now added as Main Menu CONTINUED.

On one of the images, I had the incorrect heading. It now correctly reads Search Box instead of Settings.

Ooh, thanks Windy, good to know. I'll keep it in mind for when I can get around to setting my laptop up properly again and get the cursed Win 10 back on. At the moment I'm stuck with my main OSes Ubuntu and Fedora Linuxes only, which I'll have to get rid of again and reinstall after putting Win 10 back on as otherwise Windblows will really start huffing and blowing and muck everything up.