Windows 10 - Most of taskbar completely stopped working

Question

I've had W10 running on my laptop now for quite a while, and haven't had problems as of yet.

This morning I turned on my laptop, and figured out that the start menu, search, battery, wifi, sound, notification and calendar buttons have stopped working.

The Task View button works perfectly fine, as well as the keyboard type button, as well as clicking all the open windows and pinned items on the taskbar.

Pressing the Windows button on my keyboard equally doesn't do anything. Using Windows is practically impossible without the Start menu.

Creating a new user fixes the problem, although that isn't an option for me for various reasons.

Searching the internet I found a PowerShell command that worked for some:

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

No results for me though.

What to do?

Answer 1

The start menu and task bar are run by explorer.exe. As a workaround when this happens, you can

• hit ctrl-alt-delete
• start Task manager, select the "Details" tab
• right-click explorer.exe and use "End task" to kill the process
• still in Task Manager, use the File | Run new task command. Specify explorer.exe to start a new instance of explorer

As a long-term fix... problems with explorer are almost always caused by add-on software that installs "shell extensions". See my answer here for how to troubleshoot these.

Explanation: explorer is your "shell"; "shell extensions" are modules that extend explorer, usually by adding stuff to the context menu. The fact that a different username does not show the problem is consistent with this idea, as shell extensions are often installed just for the current user when you install software.

Answer 2

1. Make sure that your is working

2. Open powershell with administrator rights Paste the following command in powershell and press ENTER:

   Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest­.xml"}

Give it 1 min then everything is back to normal.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9n0TZKvKPk