Windows 10: Taskbar Items Gone - Need Help

Hi,
My PC has decided to not show up my taskbar items today! The only icons are: Start button, cortana, task view and the notification center. The thing is that none of these will open and all my other icons are gone, even the date and time. I have tried to restart my pc and explorer.exe with no luck, and when i try customizing the taskbar i get an error saying there is no default control panel. Oh and also none of my startup programs start!



:)

 

Taskbar items gone wild

We're glad to hear that your concern has been resolved.

Feel free to post back if you have any other questions.

Regards.

 

Taskbar items gone wild

Hi guys. This is rather lengthy so please bear with me. I tried to be as detailed as possible.

So our family computer (read: old and slow but manageable) got automatically updated to Windows 10 Anniversary update (the install process was excruciatingly slow, btw), which went by without a hitch, thank goodness.

Prior to that I was having trouble with Google Chrome where there appears to be an extra search bar whenever I wanted to make a new search. I am quite sure it is a malware. It was annoying but I didn't mind at first.

After the update I decided to fix that by doing a quick scan using Windows Defender. It found a threat or two (I can't recall what they are) and cleaning them required a reboot so I opted to restart later.

Here's where I think I screwed up. Thinking it will benefit me with an extra layer of security, I also did a scan using Malwarebytes before restarting. It found threats so when it asked to restart the PC I did so as commanded.

Lo and behold, after the reboot, the Start Menu, Search, Wifi, Sound, Time, and Notifications icons on the taskbar won't work. Everything else works, like pinned apps, app switching, and right-clicking anything. I have now 16 notifications which I can't check
(is there another way to check this?). Also when I tried clicking the non-working items on the taskbar, after a couple of seconds the computer produces a sound like there is a notification, but no message pops up.

So I did some research and tried the following and all failed:

- restarting

- killing/restarting explorer.exe

- creating a new user (new user also have the issue)

- tried to roll back on a restore point, there was none

- used the Windows 10 Start Menu Troubleshooter

- on an elevated command prompt: sfc /scannow

- on an elevated command prompt: Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

- on an elevated PowerShell prompt: Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

I contemplated on rolling back to the previous build but decided against it because it will take another couple of hours of waiting. Okay, maybe if nothing else worked then I might do it.

I am still waiting for the several updates that started downloading when the upgrade was done (we have a very slow connection so it will take a while). If those updates are done and the issue still persists I am screwed and I don't know what to do next. All
that is left to try is to rollback the update or restore/reinstall Windows which is not an option right now because the machine has multiple users and I can't risk losing their data.

So for the mean time... I hope anyone can suggest anything else I could try. I am desperate.

Thanks guys.

Machine Specs:

Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 14393) (14393.rs1_release.160715-1616)

Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2200 @ 2.20GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz

Memory: 3072MB RAM

Display Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT

 

Hi, welcome to tenforums.
Basics: do you have any system restore points (is system restore enabled), or recent disk images?

Can you remember the last thing you did?
How do you know your startup programs are not running- apart from any icons etc that you might expect to be visible, have you checked using task manager? (Can you launch the task manager?)

Do you have a Win 10 installation disk for your current build (probably 10586)?

Does your PC respond if you press Win key + X?

I suggest running
Chkdsk C: /F
and
SFC /Scannow
(both from an elevated command prompt).

This should help with SFC /Scannow:
SFC Command - Run in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums
If you need to follow the instructions as to how to do that at boot, make sure you click on the relevant hyperlink (blue) in the text.

If no problems are found, and your symptoms remain, then it may be appropriate to do an in place upgrade repair install. (Instructions are available in the Tutorial section).

 

I fixed it now, the problem was due to my amd graphics drivers messing up

 

Good, at least it was just one thing.