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Monday 10 December 2007

The mystery of the disappearing Taskbar.

Once in a while, Windows gets into a terrible state and the Taskbar and its Start menu disappear. This is because the software that manages these, called the Windows Explorer shell, has crashed. To deal with this, without logging off and on the computer, you have to end any existing sessions of Explorer and run a new one.

To end existing Explorer sessions hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys and press the Delete key. On some versions of Windows this will open up the 'Windows Security' dialog box, if so then press the 'Task Manager' button; on other versions you will be taken straight to the 'Task Manager' program.

To stop the Explorer shell, go to the 'Processes' page and look for 'explorer.exe'. You can sort the processes into alphabetical order by clicking on the Image Name heading. If you find an entry for 'explorer.exe', highlight it and click the End Process button and click Yes on the warning dialog. If you don't find an entry for it you can go straight to the next step.

To restart the Explorer shell, click on the 'File' menu in Task Manager and select 'New Task (Run...)'. This will open the Run dialog box, into which you can type 'explorer' and click OK. The Taskbar should now reappear.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey homes

thanks for the younilife logo - it looks amazing..

Anonymous said...

I've been having this problem for almost a week, and been waiting for one day during the weekend where I had nothing to do, to clean my hard drive out.
and I'd have to restart my computer at least 15-20 times a day.
Once I read this & did it,
everything came back & stayed.
thanks much!

Anonymous said...

I've officially tried everything now. I followed this step and it worked brilliantly for about 2 days and now it brings the taskbar up - which promptly dissapears again after about a minute. The only way that I can get the taskbar back is to log in and out. And that works for about an hour....

I really have no idea what's going on..

Dannie
xxx

Borkiman said...

Dannie

I am afraid that this looks like you need to reinstall Windows, or to uninstall all the programs that you have running at start-up because apparently one of them is crashing Explorer.

K