Classic Shell: Forum

First, I have to say that I LOVE CLASSIC SHELL!!!!!!! I simply detest the Win 8 modern start screen and Classic Start turn this horrible Win 8 OS into a really good operating system. If MS was smart, they would buy your company and make Classic Start part of the OS.

Now for my petty little problem.

After upgrading to Win 8.1 and doing a repair install of Classic Shell, any shortcut that I place in the Classic Start "Startup" folder doesn't start after Windows boots.

Have I missed an upgrade step?

Download the Classic Shell Utility from here: http://www.classicshell.net/downloads/
Use it to create a log file and send it to me.

Here's the log file

I see one shortcut in the Startup folder called "RealTemp". Few things you can check:
Wait for 10-15 seconds and check in the Task Manager if you see a process for RealTemp.exe. On Windows 8 and 8.1 programs in the Startup folder don't run immediately but with some delay.
Does the target exe "D:\Programs\RealTemp_370\RealTemp.exe" exist?
Does running the shortcut manually actually work?
Look in the event viewer for some failure notices about RealTemp.exe.

BTW, none of this has anything to do with Classic Shell. The feature to automatically run programs from the Startup folder is part of Windows.

Wait for 10-15 seconds and check in the Task Manager if you see a process for RealTemp.exe. On Windows 8 and 8.1 programs in the Startup folder don't run immediately but with some delay.

No. RealTemp does not appear in the Task Manager after startup

Does the target exe "D:\Programs\RealTemp_370\RealTemp.exe" exist?

Yes

Does running the shortcut manually actually work?

Yes

Look in the event viewer for some failure notices about RealTemp.exe.

Nothing that relates to RealTemp

It's interesting. It used to work before the Win 8.1 upgrade and the Classic shell repair installation.

Some people have reported in the past that some startup programs fail to show their icons in the tray if Classic Shell is installed. See if temporarily disabling Classic Shell fixes this. Uncheck "Start automatically for this user" from the General Behavior tab.

Another thing to check is if the exe or the shortcut are set to run as admin. Startup programs can't run as admin because they are not supposed to ask for credentials.

After Googling for a while, I found a thread in the "WindowsEightFourm" that speaks to this issue.

As Ivo suggested, this seems to be a Windows problem. That thread suggested adding the program to the Task Scheduler. That seems to work although it is a little convoluted.

Since it used to work in Windows 8 and now it doesn't work in Win 8.1, I suspect a Microsoft screw up.

Edit....
After closely watching the boot process, the task bar icon for my start up program (RealTemp) appears very briefly (less than a second), then disappears. It looks like it is loading but something is causing it to unload.