It may just be the order of your buttons on the task bar. I just put this on a similar question:
A peculiar foible of Windows taskbar is that shortcuts you pin to it have different priorities over each other, and they are read from left to right. I bet almost nobody knows that, so, if you find your buttons behaving oddly, try a different order. I just solved a longstanding puzzle:
I've been puzzling why I could no longer pin anything to the Explorer jumplist, and had tried clearing the jumplists and the hidden files to no effect: it just meant I lost the 'frequent'/'recent' section too!
From what was said about the refuse bin and shortcuts on the taskbar, I determined that when I pinned a very useful shortcut to 'switch between windows' to the task bar (With Taskbar Pinner: why isn't it there by default!?), I pinned it at the far left side, and it overruled the Explorer jump list, which was pinned centrally. When I moved 'switch between windows' to the right of Explorer, it immediately all worked again.
I keep Explorer in the middle of the task bar because it minimises touchpad movement when getting at my most frequent folders. As a rule, I'd recommend that anyone who wants to avoid the problems above (most of all, making a new profile!!!), it would be good practice to always keep Explorer as first item at the left end of the taskbar.
[As an extra useful tool, I keep FolderSizeExplorer to the right of this, because it shows the size of all the files in a folder, though it doesn't have all the right click and toolbar options that Explorer has, with Classic Explorer added. (Hope CE adds a folder count soon!)]
It's extraordinarily satisfying to have my jumplist back! It's one of the best features of W7.