Windows 10: Disappearing/invisible/un-pinnable Microsoft Apps or other UWP Apps from Task Bar [Solved]

Hello everybody,

I have long since experienced issue with some WindowsApps not displaying their appropriate icons on the taskbar. The shortcut would show either a blank file icon or no icon whatsoever. And after the last update, I could open the app by clicking on the shortcut, but when I right-clicked on them the ONLY option which appeared was "un-pin from taskbar" yet I could not un-pin it from the taskbar, the icons would remain pinned even after a system reset.

I had tried resetting the icon cache, re-registering the taskbar through powershell, un-installing and re-installing some of those apps please note, they were all UWP apps, which can only be installed through Microsoft Store or come already pre-installed with Windows - i.e. Microsoft Store, Mail, Photos, Twitter, Spotify, etc.. None of this worked. I even went as far as to locate the UWP apps various shortcuts "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps", "%localappdata%\Packages" and "C:\Windows\SystemApps", locate the icon files, replace them or change the icon destination path for the .exe file altogether. Which, for some time, provided a good solution for me to some extent.


I may also say that I like to have a clean Start Menu and "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" folder organized so that I can easily find the shortcut to the application I'm looking for many of them are Portable apps or simple .exe files, so they won't create a shortcut automatically, which means I have to create one manually and place it in that folder and I used to navigate shell:AppsFolder for those of you who might not know, that is a folder which can only be accessed by typing that string into the address bar of an explorer window, as it has no direct "drive:\folder" path and contains the shortcuts to all WindowsApps and create a shortcut to WindowsApps as well, and place them inside "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs".

Well, I noticed that having a shortcut to a WindowsApp in the "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" folder and, I believe, also "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" WILL cause all of the aforementioned issue, probably due to conflict of some sort.

Now, I would like to suggest to the users which are experiencing the same issue, to CLEAN your "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" and "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs" of any shortcut to the apps with conflicting icons before doing anything else. That might prove to be the easiest and less risky solution after all.


And to Microsoft, to investigate this issue further, possibly try to replicate it onto other Windows machines and maybe fix it in the next update.

Will update the post with pictures soon.

:)

 

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