I had previously narrowed down the Start Menu issue to the tile layer data corruption (not the WHOLE user profile). I fought with this for 3 hours this morning!! I'm grateful for snapshots!
I have been running 11.1.3 pretty much all day with Emulator VM's and everything (aside from the Start Menu issue) all day w/o any issues so thanks guys!
To get the start menu working again I reverted to a pre-upgrade snapshot I created and cancelled the Tools installer as quick as I could after signing in. Then, I enabled the local Administrator account & gave it a password. I signed out of my current user, signed into the Administrator account and let the Parallels Tools update install. I postponed the restart and made a copy of my user's TileDataLayer Database, located at:
C:\Users\{USERNAME}\appdata\local\TileDataLayer\Database\ to back it up to
Database-WORKING.
I then rebooted, logged in as Administrator, tested the start menu (worked fine), then signed out and in as my user. No start-menu....
I signed out and back into the Administrator account, renamed the
TileDataLayer\Database folder to
TileDataLayer\Database-NO-WORKIE. I then copied the
Database-Working folder and renamed it to just
Database.
After I signed out of the Administrator user, and back in as myself, it worked fine. I rebooted to verify that the start menu would still work correctly and it's been all day today.
@parallels if you could look into the start menu, specifically the TileDataLayer folder, there is something definitely going on there as it was corrupted after the first login after rebooting from the tools update install. I have customized my tiles on my start menu/task bar and this folder contains the data used for the start menu.