// Project update
Put the start orb anywhere you want
Posted 26 April 2026
For nearly twenty years ViStart has tried to find Microsoft's Start button and place itself on top of it. That fight is over.
In the latest ViStart .NET build, hold Ctrl and drag to move the orb anywhere on screen. Hold Ctrl and drag the menu surface to do the same for the menu — and because the menu's offset is stored relative to the orb, the menu travels with the orb when you move it. They stay attached. Positions persist between launches.
This is partly a feature and partly an honest admission. Auto-placing across XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11 is a losing fight. Windows 11 alone has shifted the Start button across multiple updates, and on modern shells it isn't even a classic child window ViStart can find. Letting the user decide takes a fragile chunk of detection code out of the critical path and replaces it with the most reliable input method we have: a person dragging a thing where they want the thing to be.
Other things that arrived in the .NET port lately
- 17 language packs — English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Turkish. Right-click the orb → Language → switch live, no restart.
- Right-click the orb for a proper context menu: Skins, Orbs, Language, Reset orb position, Reset menu position, Exit. Skin and orb switching apply immediately.
- x64 build configurations alongside the existing x86 default.
- No Visual Studio required to build.
dotnet buildworks on its own thanks to a switch toMicrosoft.NETFramework.ReferenceAssemblies, and GitHub Actions CI now builds every commit. - First-launch tooltip on the orb explaining the Ctrl+drag gesture, in case you missed this post.
Credits
A lot of the recent work has been community contribution from George King — language support, the right-click context menu, x64 builds, GitHub CI, and the build-without-Visual-Studio rework all came from him. If you've been around the Lee-Soft scene a while you may already know his name from the old skins archive. He's come back and pushed the .NET port forward more in the last few weeks than I have in the last year, and that's exactly what the open-source pivot was supposed to enable.
If you want to try it, the source is at github.com/lee-soft/ViStart.NET. It builds clean from the command line. Bring patches.