For the uninitiated, StartIsBack (now often referred to as StartAllBack on Windows 11) is a tiny, lightweight piece of software that fixes Microsoft’s biggest UI sins. It gives you back the classic, functional, non-touch-centric Start Menu. It ungroups your taskbar icons. It makes the right-click menu actually useful again.
It costs about $5 for a lifetime license.
And yet, here we are.
The most basic approach involves deleting specific registry keys. Users have reported navigating to paths such as: startisback trial reset
The theory is to delete these keys, reboot, and reinstall. However, modern versions (v2.9+ and v3.x) use obfuscated key names and system-protected locations, rendering this method ineffective.
It’s not about the $5. I’ve spent $5 on worse things—a stale gas station sandwich, a mobile game skin I used once.
It’s psychological. It’s the principle. It’s the same reason people jailbreak their iPhones or mod their Nintendo Switches. We don’t want to pay for the fix to a problem Microsoft created. For the uninitiated, StartIsBack (now often referred to
We feel entitled to the classic menu. It was there for 20 years. Microsoft broke it to sell you touch-screen ads in your start menu. Paying a third-party dev to fix Microsoft’s mistake feels like paying a ransom.
Resetting the trial feels like civil disobedience. It feels like sticking it to the man, even though the “man” in this case is a lone developer in Eastern Europe who actually did the heroic work.
If $3.99 is genuinely a barrier, or if you simply dislike the principle of paying for a Start Menu, you have better—and safer—options than hacking a trial. The theory is to delete these keys, reboot, and reinstall
This is the most dangerous method. A user downloads an executable from a torrent site or a shady forum that promises to "reset StartIsBack trial" or "patch StartIsBack.dll."
How these work (poorly): These patchers attempt to modify the executable or DLL files that handle license verification, often by replacing a JNZ (jump if not zero) instruction with a JMP (unconditional jump) in assembly code.
The catastrophic risks: