Windows 10: Explorer.exe not working and other sundry things

Hi all, I must say I feel a little ........ sheepish I guess is the word, asking for help here as I'm used to giving the help (at least at Sevenforums). Guess I need to get to work on 10 so I can get back to giving......... *Smile

Anyway......... I received a older laptop as gift. It is a Dell Inspiron. Can't tell you much more because I have no desktop or search ability at the moment. This machine had Win7 on it and I immediately upgraded to 10 using the "old" usb installation media. (Old as in I used it to upgrade my other machine) Everything went fine until I tried to activate Windows and got the 0xC004C003 Error. Thats the least of my problems at the moment though. After another round of updates after I signed in from the restart I had/have ........... no desktop and only about 1/3 of my taskbar. No search at all and very little else. (Task view, Edge, Windows Store and my open Maxthon)

Tried opening Task manager and running a new task - explorer.exe - and it opens file explorer. Am I mistaken that explorer.exe should give me my desktop and search back?

Any help is seriously appreciated.

:)

 

Taskbar not working as expected (and other things)

Hello everyone.

I recently changed the Owner of my C:\ drive (properties/security/advanced) from TrustedInstaller to my account and gave my account full access (to subdirectories aswell).

Since then, the taskbar doesn't work as expected:

• Left click on start button doesn't work, right click does,
• Windows key won't display the menu (shorcuts work e.g. Windows+R),
• Right click on applications pinned to the taskbar doesn't work, left click does,
• Left click on date doesn't display the calendar anymore,
• Left click on notifications doesn't display the notifications center anymore.
• Calculator can't start anymore

I tried the "sfc /scannow" thing but it says some files can't be repaired. And in the log I have a lot of errors like this "Error - Overlap: Duplicate ownership for directory".

I tried aswell the powershell commands we find everywhere about taskbar problems (Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers....).

I also tried this: dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

Is there any way to fix this without having to reset Windows ?

Thanks.

***Thread moved to the appropriate category by moderator***

 

Taskbar not working as expected (and other things)

Hi Ben,

Upon analyzing the details you have provided, we suggest that you
change
again
the
ownership
of your
C:\ drive and
change
the
permission
settings
to
everyone. After doing so,
restart
your
PC
and check if there's any changes.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards.

 

In my rush to "tinker" with this new (to me) piece of hardware I neglected some fundamentals I'm afraid. Like, most importantly, not checking to see if this older machine was fully updated or not. I still have the same problem but I'm treating it like an idiot behind the keyboard thing. I'll be reinstalling Win7, making SURE its fully updated and reinstalling 10.