Windows 10: Start menu, taskbar, windows key all broken

Hey all. I’m at a completely loss here. Somewhat suddenly, my HP laptop running Windows 10 began having a problem with the taskbar. I’ll try to provide as much info as I can here: I restarted my computer to fix a problem with Slack/Chrome where slack was repeatedly and intermittently opening browser tabs. Quitting slack did not fix that issue, so I restarted the computer. Not sure how relevant this is. When the computer rebooted, my login took longer than normal and upon reaching the desktop, the taskbar had no icons on it, hovering over it with my mouse showed only the blue loading wheel, and

:)

 

Windows 10 Personalise Taskbar > Start menu broken

After a fresh windows 10 install,

after configurating the time to my timezone and syncing the time, made the personalise taskbar > start menu broken.

none of the option works anymore, like show or hide app list. Show new apps and suggetion and or frequent used apps.

 

Feature suggestion: Add right-click menu

Suggestion: Please add a Windows 7 Jump-List and/or right-click menu to the GPU-Z icon in the Windows taskbar. Possible menus in it would be "Exit" and "About GPU-Z...".
Maybe also "Switch to tab 1/Switch to tab 2/Switch to videocard 1/Switch to videocard 2" too.
Examples of programs that have such menus are ICQ, Skype, AIM.

NOTE: It seems for a right-click menu, Windows 7 is not needed - it works on WinXP and Vista too.
But even a Windows 7 Jump-list may be good enough.
What do you think?

 

Taskbar hides and shows itself after opening start menu.

Steps:

1. Using HDMI for a second monitor.
2. Open start menu using the icon.
3. Close start menu using the icon.
4. Click anywhere other than the task bars. (e.g. an open window, the desktop, even the first monitor's desktop)
   
5. Taskbar on second monitor slides down to be hidden.
6. Taskbar then immediately slides up to reappear.

If after closing the start menu (step 3), you click on the taskbar, then click outside the taskbar, this behavior does not occur.

Performing the steps on the main monitor's taskbar does not produce this behavior.

This has been happening for as long as I can remember using this laptop (~3years), with different nVidia drivers and Windows 10 updates.