Have you ever had this happen? You uninstall Xbox, Solitaire, Clipchamp, that LinkedIn thing, and whatever Copilot bit is cluttering your Start menu this week. A few weeks go by, Windows does one of its updates overnight, and the next morning half of them are back, sometimes alongside new ones you never had before.
Windows 11 is doing exactly what Microsoft told it to do, and there are a few different layers to turn off before the cleanup sticks.
Why the apps keep coming back
Two separate things are happening here.
The first is that a lot of these apps are what Microsoft calls provisioned apps. They're staged on your machine at the system level and automatically added to every user profile after a feature update. When you uninstall Xbox from the Start menu, you're removing it for your account only. The provisioned copy is still sitting there, and the next big update re-adds it because as far as Windows is concerned, that app is supposed to be there.
The second is the Start menu and lock screen serving you ads. Microsoft calls them "recommendations," "tips," "suggestions," and "fun facts," but a lot of them are app promotions — new icons and prompts pushed in front of you for things you never asked for. Turning these off doesn't uninstall anything, but it stops the drip of new icons showing up.
So there are three jobs: uninstall the app for your account, tell Windows to stop suggesting new ones, and remove the provisioned copy so the app doesn't return on the next update.
Uninstall from the Start menu
Click the Start button, find the app, right-click it, and choose Uninstall. For most of the built-in bloat — Xbox, Solitaire & Casual Games, Clipchamp, the LinkedIn shortcut, News, Weather — this works fine and the app disappears. It only removes the app for your user account, though, so it's the layer that gets undone by updates.
Turn off Start menu suggestions
Open Settings > Personalization > Start and turn off Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more, Show recently added apps, and Show account-related notifications. The first setting is what slides new app icons into your Start menu without asking; the other two cut down on Microsoft's account-related nudges. Turning them off doesn't uninstall anything you already have, but it stops fresh promotions from appearing.
Turn off lock screen and notification ads
Go to Settings > Personalization > Lock screen. If the background is set to Windows spotlight, change it to Picture or Slideshow, or at minimum turn off Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen.
Then go to Settings > System > Notifications, scroll to the bottom, and expand Additional settings. Turn off all three: the welcome experience, the finish-setup suggestions, and Get tips and suggestions when using Windows. That last one is the "Get the most out of Windows" prompt that shows up after updates and tries to walk you back through signing into things you already declined.
Remove the provisioned app
This is the layer that keeps an app from returning on the next feature update, and it needs PowerShell run as administrator. Click the Start button, type PowerShell, right-click Windows PowerShell, and choose Run as administrator.
To find the app's real name, search for it by running this command for anything Xbox-related:
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers *xbox*
Look at the PackageFullName and the shorter Name in the output. Then remove it from your account and from the provisioned list so new user profiles and future updates don't re-add it:
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers *xbox* | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object DisplayName -like "*xbox*" | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online
Swap *xbox* for whatever you're chasing — *clipchamp*, *solitaire*, *linkedin*, *bing*, and so on. The first command removes the app from every user account on the machine right now. The second removes the staged copy so it doesn't get reinstalled the next time Windows does one of its overnight updates.
A word of caution: don't blindly remove things you don't recognize. Some Appx packages are Windows components with harmless-looking names, and removing the wrong one can break Start, Search, or Settings. Stick to the apps you can see in your Start menu and know you want gone.
What to expect
After those four steps, your Start menu stops growing new icons, the lock screen stops pitching you things, and the apps you uninstalled stay uninstalled through the next feature update. A major new Windows version will bring a fresh round of Microsoft's ideas, but the list will be shorter and the same PowerShell commands will handle whatever's new.
Leave a comment