Windows 10: Unresponsive Taskbar

Sort of a quick workround. Spent hours trying to fathom out what was causing the problem, only thing I noticed that when it happened, in Task Manager Startup, the Startup Impact was not showing anything recorded also I have the defender icon in the systray along with Malwarebytes Anti-Explot Beta and neither of them were loading, Network and the sound icon were though. Should also add this was happening on two of my three Win10 PC's.
I only acquired the problem in the Creators Update and it was intermittent, had it once on this PC after upgrading to FCU so ran Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth in a cmd window. Repeated on the other PC and haven't had an occurrence on either PC since.

 

Yes, the Fall Creators Update was the direct culprit of the taskbar/start icon not functioning for me. How extensively have you stress tested the Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth fix? Did you reboot/restart windows up to ten times to see if you experienced the problem again? How about from a cold boot? I thought I had fixed the problem using the cleanup image tool as well, only to have it come back. I swear it has something to do with the default user that is created by Windows 10 during a clean install of an OS build.

Somehow or other in the FCU, during boot-up, I'm surmising that sign-on privileges are somehow being assigned incorrectly between accounts. So.......... I tried the create another account and assign it administrator privileges from a clean install, and still the problem returns.

So when it happens, I sign-out (but when I do, a task host informs me a plugnplay device needs to finish installing before the sign-out can proceed) but luckily the option to force a sign-out is possible and then the computer reassigns me on and everything works normally.

As far as I can tell, this task host error message is bogus and relates to nothing on my system at the time of the occurrence and timestamp in the event viewer.

Something is seriously messed up in the FCU. Account inheritances between an administrator user and the automatically generated default account user created by Windows 10 is causing conflicts as to which account is in control of the desktop, start icon and taskbar at boot-up.

 

I updated to FCU on day 1 on both PC's and ran DISM within an hour or so so that's nearly a month or so with many reboots cold starts etc without the problem.

 

I'm going to have another go with the DISM tool; because realistically, it beats the heck out of creating another user account. The instructions to create another user account require creating the account as a non-administrator which boils down to a clean install of the OS build all over again in order to just create the non-administrative account to then only have to assign it administrative privileges anyway.

That was one of the fixes suggested a while back and it strenuously suggested that you just couldn't de-authorize the current administrative account in order to create a non-administrative account. You actually had to start from the scratch of the OS build and create a regular-user account in order to create the administrative account needed to inherit the permissions correctly. On top of that, keep in mind the auto-generated Windows 10 account is still created no matter what method of installation you use to install the current FCU build.

So in theory, I should've realized that certainly could not of fixed my problem; because as I mentioned, I seriously think it has to do with the auto-generated Windows 10 account and its' inheritable permissions. I think that account (the auto-generated one) is the super-user system account and it has somehow changed in FCU and it is borked.

 

Well, it has been four or five hours since the last occurrence of my taskbar being unresponsive. I have done several restarts as well as cold boot-ups and so far I have been unable to reproduce or invoke the problem to show itself.

I wanted to clarify a few things I may have misspoken/mistyped about earlier:

1. I did not run the DISM tool as a remedy for this problem; meaning I didn't run it a second time when the problem started again.

2. I updated outdated drivers; of which I think I had a total of six outdated drivers altogether of like 108 drivers total on my system. Two of them were outdated drivers for unattached devices and the other four were rather trivial driver updates that in no way shape or form could of had anything to do with the unresponsive taskbar. The screenshot from earlier of the driver updater I posted changed somewhat after my first driver update. There was one driver in question that scared me to install, so I manually created a restore point first. I think that driver cured the problem I was having though, so I won't question something that worked!

Now, here is where it gets interesting. I had tried the registry tweak that was mentioned earlier in the thread. It seemed to have worked for a little while and then it apparently just didn't matter the registry was tweaked; so I restored the registry back to its original configuration before updating the drivers through the link provided earlier in the thread.

After updating what few drivers I had out of date; the problem that this thread was all about, just hasn't been able to reproduce itself. I find that rather intriguing considering that the error codes thrown out by the event viewer make no mention of drivers being outdated as a possible culprit. Although in all honesty, I do have to confess that I didn't investigate further into the one error code that suggested to check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel that threw out an error Event ID of 1002.

Well that is it for now. I will keep stress testing the system to see if it holds up with no unexpected behavior in the start menu, taskbar or start Windows icon. After a few more days of testing and everything turns out fine, I will mark this as solved. I still want to know why Windows Update was not installing crucial drivers to prevent their own OS from becoming unresponsive.

 

I've not read through this entire thread so I might be off base, but Brink actually has a tutorial for restarting Explorer via right click context menu - Restart Explorer Context Menu - Add in Windows 10 Customization Tutorials . Works like a charm *Wink

Would be nice if MS actually fixed the issues though. That said, since updating to FCU I don't get as many freezes as I did prior so... And yes, its been around before FCU.

 

It has come to my attention that outdated drivers were causing my taskbar, start menu, and taskbar icons to be unresponsive. It has also come to my attention that even though Windows Update works in conjunction with device manager to acquire driver updates; Microsoft has a strict policy about pushing driver updates. In other words, Microsoft will not push driver updates through Windows Update until it is absolutely necessary to maintain an Operating Systems stability. Even though you may find the driver update in the Microsoft Update Catalog for the current OS build, you still have to fetch it manually because Windows Update will not force it.

How do I know this? Well I found out the hard way that I have to still rely on a third party vendor to keep an on-line OS operating efficiently. Kind of sad actually, because I thought that was the whole idea behind Windows 10, which is to say when they performed the compatibility check in the first place to determine if a system was upgradeable or not. Keep in mind, that is every computer that requested an upgrade on-line.

I'm going to let a couple of more days go by and see if my problem returns. So far it hasn't and the only thing I did so far, is update the drivers.

I did tweak the registry; but as you mentioned, you didn't read the whole thread to realize I restored the registry before proceeding with the driver updates. I systematically change only one thing at a time on my computer so I can keep track of what works. If what I changed doesn't work, I change it back and try another solution until I pinpoint a desired outcome. Sometimes, it takes a combination of solutions to achieve a desired result; but in this particular case I got lucky and it was only one thing --- outdated drivers.