I did that more than once before I did anything else. Didn't make any difference. That's why I then tried rebooting and then moved on to the other troubleshooting steps.
Windows 11 File Explorer address and menu bars invisible
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Anonymous
Suddenly on one of my Windows 11 Pro systems at home the address bar and menu bar became invisible. They were there and responded to mouse clicks and I could type in the address bar. But they are invisible. The problem existed whether signed in to the console session or an RDP session.
Also, in File Explorer and on the desktop when I right clicked, the menu window appeared but was blank. I could move the cursor through it and see a change and get submenus to open but of course they too were blank. I clicked on these menus and they responded with the appropriate response depending on where the cursor was when clicked.
I tried playing with themes, display properties, I've run SFC /scannow and DISM (with the restorehealth option). The first SFC found corruption and said it fixed it. Subsequent runs have found no problems. The last thing I did was do a Reset (keeping files). Nothing I've done has made any difference.
My account has admin rights on the system. I tried signing in with another account which also has admin rights and for this account the bars weren't invisible but simply not there. I then signed out of the other account and signed back in as myself. Much to my surprise the bars are now gone for me as well! This had not happened despite multiple reboots and all else that I had done. Only after signing in with the other account and then back in as myself. I rebooted but no change.
Any ideas how to fix this one system?
Jonathan
Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures
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.
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Anonymous
2024-01-26T22:49:14+00:00 -
Anonymous
2024-05-20T23:01:01+00:00 I can confirm that certain display adapters are involved with this issue. This case is an old dell computer with a Intel Q35 Chipset, and the WDDM driver somehow bonks the ribbon bar.
In this case selecting display drivers, update, select from a list and selecting Microsoft Basic Display Adapter restored the menu bar. We did have to manually update the screen resolution. This is a simple work computer, no graphics acceleration.
I guess you could experiment with later similar drivers from Intel, I would guess they might work with an older chipset.
Or an inexpensive gpu card would probably work
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Anonymous
2024-05-17T04:29:02+00:00 On my French WIndows 11 family 23H2, I had to uninstall KB5037771 to bring back my address bar.
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Anonymous
2024-05-15T21:00:52+00:00 Well, I just gave Vivetool a try, successfully.
It is an external tool that, amongst things, can be used to enable certain features in Windows. The tool is available on github. The files from the zip-file need to be extracted to the system32 folder. After that, you can re-enable the bar via the command prompt (with administrative privileges) using the command "vivetool /enable /id:40950262". Reboot and done.
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Anonymous
2024-02-10T02:40:34+00:00 I too was beginning to think that I was the only one experiencing this problem, until I found your writeup here.
I noticed that if I hold down the Shift key and right click on the desktop, "Show more options" 'page' of the context menu is visible. So added "Restart Windows Explorer" in my context menu. Slightly less inconvenient than restarting it from task manager?
Stevie Rhys