Recently issues have arisen with some skins and later Start10 releases due to the inclusion of longer text on the shutdown button when updates are pending.  This can result in the right hand side of the startmenu being wider than originally expected.  The problem occurs when the StartPanel.UserPane image is used and the skin has a specific right hand look.

The reason is this section is stretched to the full width of the start menu which means if you try to put things in both the left and right margins you will end up with a design which cannot cope with any changes in sizes as the right hand list image will no longer line up with this section due to the margins.

This section has been recommended against for new skins for many years now as it is a legacy Windows XP part.  WB has to jump through a lot of hoops to make this even work on Windows 7 and up!  There is a note in SKS about this on the image tab suggesting new skins do not use this section and instead disable it on the extra settings tab (it is the bottom option in the list).

The purpose of this note is to explain how to achieve the same design and improve compatibility going forwards and also have a better looking skin for search mode whilst you are at it.

What was to go in the top area should instead be put in the Programs List, and places list sections and content margins used to shift the content down appropriately.  This will avoid any issues with the left or right hand sides being different sizes.

For the bottom area you have Bottom bar which by default also stretches like StartPanel.UserPane did.  However there is also a section called Bottom bar (right).  When this is defined this is the right hand side bottom and StartPanel.BottomBar is only used for the left.

Note that when the above sections are defined you must also define the SearchMode bottom sections (left & right), and I recommend also defining the search mode top section and related sections and having a non split (left/right) look for those as it will always look a little odd with the search results in the middle on a solid colour anyway with a split look.

This sounds like a lot of extra work, but you end up with a startmenu which can handle differing widths on the left and right which is useful when on non US English installs, when updates are pending or should we ever open up the scaling option we offer in Start10 for the inbuilt styles to WB skins too.  You can also now have different looks for expanded mode as the Windows 7 menu did for example.

Please note that we are not expecting every skin author to drop everything and make changes, we just ask that future updates and new skins try to use the newer sections to avoid problems going forwards.