// Flagship

ViStart

A Windows 7-style start menu for any Windows, since 2007.

ViStart originally appeared in 2006 as a prototype inside Lucifiar's Vista Transformation Pack — long before there was a lee-soft.com to host it. He bundled the early builds, did the QA on them, and was the first publisher of every version until I split it out in 2007.

ViStart is the one most people end up here for. It's a start menu replacement that does what Microsoft used to do before they started moving things around every release — give you a list of programs, a search box, and a way to pin the things you actually use.

It works on XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11. Same binary, same VB6 runtime that's been on every Windows install since 1998, no .NET dependency, no telemetry, no account, no nag.

What it does

• Replaces the start menu with one you can actually configure. Pin programs, search files, browse all apps — the basics done properly.
• Skinnable — there's a library of skins inspired by every era of Windows (Vista, 7, 8, XP), and you can write your own.
• A custom start button (the orb), with a few default options out of the box.
• File and program search that's actually fast, because it builds an index instead of walking the disk on every keystroke.
• A control panel that exposes everything without making you edit the registry.
• On Windows 8 specifically, it can hide the charms bar.
• Native UI translations in nine languages — English, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Korean, Chinese, Dutch — most of them contributed by the community via the vilang.sif format that landed with Seven Transformation Pack 4.0 in 2009.

Where it stands

Last shipped: 8.1.0.5311 (March 2023) — the Windows 11 support release. Still works fine on current Windows builds at time of writing. The codebase is VB6, at github.com/lee-soft/ViStart. The .NET port is in progress, slowly, at github.com/lee-soft/ViStart.NET.

Around 2009 I rewrote almost the whole thing. Earlier builds had to "hack" Explorer to insert themselves into the start area — it worked, but to quote what I wrote at the time, "the only reason I didn't use ViStart myself was because it kept crashing Explorer." The 2009 rewrite pinned down the bugs that had been plaguing it for two years: the magical transparent text box on XP, the shutdown-hang from mishandling WM_QUERYENDSESSION/WM_CLOSE, the keyboard-focus theft. The current 8.1.x line traces back to that rewrite.

The Russian translation came from a forum mod named Alex / fediafedia using Resource Hacker to swap bitmaps inside the EXE — that hack got merged into the official build. skipper rebuilt the installer in late 2007. Bits of ViStart still come from people who showed up.

Some places ViStart turned up

Marques Brownlee — yes, MKBHD — made a 2½-minute ViStart tutorial in February 2009, back when he was a Windows-XP-customisation-era teenager and his channel was something other than "the biggest tech YouTube on Earth." He was actually using ViStart in his own videos at the time. "Here's a tutorial on how to get all the Vista start menu features I use in my videos – for Windows XP Users!"

"An awesome choice for those who wish to customize the appearance of their Operating System. The fine selection of styles and buttons, together with the wide array of tweaks recommend it as a reliable Start Menu manager." — Softpedia

"Created by our friend 'Lee Matthew Chantrey' which can be considered as a Windows Vista and Windows 7 Start menu clone for Windows XP and Windows 8. It integrates itself into Windows Explorer perfectly." — AskVG

"ViStart works great in Windows 8 to provide a replacement for the missing start menu." — Windows 8 for Dummies (book)

"Freeware app ViStart brings the functionality of the Windows Vista Start Menu to Windows XP." — Lifehacker

"ViStart is a good example that makes the Windows XP Start Menu look just like that of Vista." — vnunet

"ViStart is the standalone Start Menu that runs in Windows XP, and perfectly replaces your Start Menu." — Cybernetnews

Featured by Chip.de in Germany. ViStart 1.6 (and the prototype ViSplore 0.9) shipped on the cover DVD-ROM of iP! — a Japanese Windows magazine published by SHINYUSHA — after their editor wrote in asking permission. Earlier I'd just been making something I wanted myself; finding out it was on a Japanese DVD-ROM was when I realised this had become A Thing.