Windows 10 Taskbar bug presented in 1709, worst on 1803 upgrade

Hi everyone,

I am one of the Windows debug engineers that works in Microsoft support. We have had a couple of cases opened up on the issues reported on this thread and we have been working with the Windows product group team to make sure we get them addressed. This turns out to be a pretty complicated topic. There are some issues here that are the OS's fault, and some others here that are the applications fault. Before the walk through these, let talk about what is going on. The vocabulary: The part of the taskbar we are reviewing is sometimes called the systray, but it is more accurately referred to as the "notification area". The part of the notification area that hides icons for applications when they are not providing a notification and where the user has not selected to have the icon visible all the time, are in an area that is displayed when you click on the chevron/caret icon. This area is referred to as the "notification overflow area".

Now... I am going to try to walk through the reported issues:

1. The blurry icon issue. This impacts some applications, but not all. When an application asks the OS to display an icon in the notification area, the app provides the location of this icon. The application itself is responsible for registering for notifications regarding changes to the screen resolution, DPI, taskbar restart, etc. The application shoulddetect resolution or DPI changes and provide an appropriately sized icon. This is where it gets tricky. If the app does not provide a updated icon the OS tries to helpby taking a copy of the icon and scaling it to work on the new resolution/DPI. This works... kinda. Stretched images are better than no image, but the fidelity of the image is reduced. If the resolution/DPI changes again, we make a mistake of using the copy and not the original image. This means the image gets worse and worse. This issue should only occur if the app is not doing what it should to handle resolution/DPI changes and we are working on making this better in the next version of Windows.

We can see this happening in the following sequence. Here is our Windows Defender/Security Center icon before any resolution/DPI changes:

Here is the same icon after multiple changes to resolution/DPI

Not a great look. We have followed up the product group that owns this and they have updated the code to handle screen resolution/DPI changes. This will be updated in the next version of Windows (confirmed no repro on latest builds - build number below)

2. The notification area falling behind the taskbar (or just being chopped off). This was all an OS issue. This has been addressed in the next version of Windows. Here is what the bad behavior looked like:

3. The padding/spacing issue in the notification overflow area occurred after one or more resolution/DPI changes. Here is what it looked like:

Kinda bad:

Really bad:

This is an OS issue that is being addressed in the next version of Windows

4. The missing icon issue. This is when you change resolution/DPI and an applications notification icon is just missing. This is a variant of issue #1. This occurs when the app does not register to handle the notifications as opposed to handling the notification and not providing an icon for the specified resolution/DPI.

Here is a before and after view

After resolution/DPI change

Where did OneDrive, Bluetooth, etc. go? Each of these components has to make sure they handle the resolution/DPI change notifications. We have been tracking down each team hear at MS that we have found to be not handling this well and working with them to get this fixed.

On the latest fast ring builds for the fall update for Windows 10, it appears that most of these issues no longer occur. I am running build 18234. If you run into any of these issues on this build or later, reply to this post to let us know.

 - Jason

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your continued sharing of information of the issue. As another work around while this issue is being investigated, we recommend that you back up all your files and programs, and roll back to previous builds for the meantime. Rest assured, our developers are investigating the issue.

I'll be keeping this thread posted for any progress.

The next version, 1809, is currently at the escrow build 17751.1.

17751.1 removes the pre-release watermark, and I've been running it on my main PC for a couple of days without issues so far. The bottom line is 1809 fixes the annoying overflow notification icon/window issues (the jury is still out on blurry icons, but again the onus on that is the app vendors themselves to implement them properly).

If you're seriously annoyed by the problem, you might consider enabling Insider Preview to get to 17751.1, and then disabling it after the public release in October.

Update 09/07: 17755.1 was released, and continues to be good for the notification overflow issues.

Update 09/11: 17758.1 was released, still good.

so will it resolve?

This is noted Jim Harle (O365). I'll have this added on the report investigation I filed. Your inputs is greatly appreciated. I'll keep on monitoring this thread and also keep everyone posted here for any changes.

I encourage everyone that if you would like me to provide additional advice, simply respond to this thread. I will get notified and I’ll reply to you as soon as I can.

Thanks,