Users Taskbar freezes and can't click anything.

Question

Recently our users have been experiencing a weird issue, when they sign into Windows they can't click the taskbar and it freezes the PC if you click it. Not every user in our office has this issue and it seems to happen gradually. Also, if I sign in with a new account it is fine, only the main user of that computer is having the issue.

We can fix it by deleting the user profile and recreating it but that removes their settings, saved bookmarks, printers and their most crucial piece, the Taskbar. I tried copying their Roaming Folder, from %AppData%, that holds the Taskbar settings but nothing gets pinned for them.

Possible Fixes I tried:

1. This PowerShell Script

     Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
   
     This worked on two computers and no others, also the issue came back a day later, for one of the users.
   

2. Removed the latest Windows Update, although it was 5 days before we had this issue.
3. Restarting or Stopping Windows Explorer also did nothing.
4. Running ChkDsk and SFC also had no success.

Anyone know a better fix for this or why it is happening now and randomly for users? Also, anyone know a way to keep a users profile settings on a Domain level, so its the same no matter what PC they log into? We can use Intune but Intune stinks.

Is there a way to reset a users profile without deleting their settings, so favorites and shortcuts remained unchanged?
With this taskbar issue its really hard to try to backup their Favorites, and their passwords can't be exported and then imported in to Edge, for whatever reason Edge doesn't have an import feature, even turning on the beta import Edge://flags setting, it doesn't let me import.

Answer 1

HI

1.Are both normal win10(21h1) and issue win10(21h1) upgraded from win10(1909)?
I discovery that the issue computer is upgraded from win10(1909) to win10(21h1) and the normal computer is not.

2.If the normal user discover current taskbar issue, please run to check if there is update patch installed on this computer recently.
get-hotfix

3.When taskbar issue happen,
(1)Please write down the system time on issue win10.
(2)Please do clean boot then check if the same issue happen?
(3)Please run store app troubleshooter to check if it can detect issue?
Windows Store Apps troubleshooter for Windows 10
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-store-apps-troubleshooter-for-windows-10

(4)please click zoomed out icon in taskbar(like windows store, edge etc) and check if there are logs about our issue in below location on issue time?

C:\windows\system32\winevt\logs\
System.evtx
setup.evtx
application.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-Store%4Operational.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-AppReadiness%4Admin.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-AppReadiness%4Operational.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-AppXDeploymentServer%4Operational.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-AppXDeployment%4Operational.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-AppxPackaging%4Operational.evtx
Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI%4Operational.evtx

Answer 2

Has the problem been resolved? If so, how? I have the same on the corporate network and we can't handle it.

Answer 3

Our users on RDS server are having the same issue too. It is bad in the week 03/13-03/24. but it seems this started happening in Feb. 2023.

Windows explore consistently taking large CUP usage as well.

Any solution is welcome.