Hi, I’ve been investigating this exact issue and here’s what I found:
- The delay when opening the Start Menu on Windows 10 22H2 matches very high spikes in
dxgkrnl.sysanddxgmms2.sys(the DirectX graphics kernel components). - I captured several traces with ETL/WPA, and the results are consistent: opening the Start Menu triggers extra DxgKrnl load, even without GPU drivers (just using the Basic Display Adapter).
- In Safe Mode, the problem does not happen at all, maybe because DWM Composition works in a different way, idk.
I believe the issue started after installing KB5063842 (August 2025, Cumulative Update Preview). Microsoft hasn’t listed this as a known issue yet, but everything points to that update changing how the Start Menu interacts with DWM/DxgKrnl.
So far I’ve seen 3 or 4 people with this problem, and all of them were using an NVIDIA GPU. I don’t know if that’s related, but in my case it does not happen when using an AMD GPU.