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Good evening,
I upgraded my PC to WIndows 11 from Windows 10 a bit ago and have been periodically running into an issue that has been the cause of great frustration. Occasionally after restarting my PC the taskbar will no longer function, and will be blank, and any functions of my computer related to explorer.exe as well as microsoft apps like the Settings, Get Help, and others, will no longer function. This is not always resolved by restarting explorer.exe, and has led 4 tickets with Microsoft support resulting in several in place upgrades and even several full resets of the pc, to no avail.
The device I am experiencing these issues on is an MSI GE63 Raider RGB 8RF, and meets the minimum requirements of Windows 11. It has the following Specifications as per its performance:
Intel i7-8750H CPU (2.2 GHZ)
16 GB DDR4 Ram
NVidia GTX 1070 GPU w/ 8 GB GDDR5
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Experiencing this also - really hope a fix is addressed soon by Microsoft as it's increasingly frustrating!
The only other solution I can think of to fix this, would be to rollback to Windows 10...but this would require a lot of backing up files etc.
As of yesterday, this is happening to me also.
What you can do is press Shift+Ctrl+Esc to open task manager, then scroll down the list to Windows Processes. In this list, you should see Windows Explorer and you can right click it and hit restart.
This isn't quite a fix, as in it may happen again, but at least you won't have to keep restarting your computer.
EDIT: I forgot to ask, you said that restarting this doesn't always resolve your problem. What happens once you do restart explorer?
I have also this problem. When Windows starts, my task bar empty. I wait a couple minutes then Shift+Ctrl+Esc to open task manager and find explorer.exe. When I restart explorer.exe, windows plays the starting sound and everything backs to normal. I tried to use "sfx /scannow" command, even reinstalled windows but when updates are done this issue starts again.
I haven't seen to much in a pattern other than it usually starts after a restart. I will turn off my computer for the night, come back in the morning to the issue.
So what I have found is that sometimes restarting explorer.exe does not do the trick so I do a full restart, and then restart explorer.exe which sometimes resolves the issue temporarily. There are many times where restarting explorer.exe does not resolve the issue also.
