Icons Keep Disappearing From Taskbar - Windows 11

I think the issue went away for me after I unpinned everything from my taskbar, and then re-pinned the programs I use daily. Now, I admit, it could be coincidence. To be honest, I don't know for sure what causes this bug, or why it went away. But since the day that I unpinned and re-pinned my taskbar icons, I've not seen this issue [knocks on wood] 🙂. So I'll offer this as something you can try 🤞.

Prior to that day, I was having the same issues as everyone in this thread... somewhat randomly, maybe 3 out of 5 times, after a resume from sleep, I'd have missing icons on the taskbar, like this:

When the taskbar looks like the above, File Explorer (that's explorer.exe) would have other problems. I only got this once, but one day the address bar... the one that shows you which folder you're in... was all black, like this:

Reboot fixed this... but only temporarily. Every resume from sleep was a roll of the dice, and too often, explorer.exe would be in a bad state, affecting the taskbar, desktop, File Explorer, etc. Anyways, that's what brought me to this thread. Every time, I could temporarily fix the issue with a reboot or a restart of explorer.exe, which seems to point to a bug in explorer.exe.

I'm posting this in the hopes that:
a) someone from MSFT sees this and can direct it to the appropriate team to be fixed, and
b) maybe🤞 the unpin/repin of icons on the taskbar that I mentioned above will help someone else out there.

Hope this helps,
Dave

How can this _still_ be an issue :-( Happens to me constantly on several different machines.

I have exactly the same symptoms :-

• icons disappear after Windows comes back from "sleep" mode
• sometimes all icons disappear, sometimes only a few of them
• not consistent - I have had runs of weeks when all is OK, and other times it happens a lot
• Items will re-appear if empty icon space is clicked; if Windows Explorer is re-started in Task Manager or if the PC itself is restarted.
• It has only happened to me in WIndows 11, never in windows 10 before
• Windows 11 Home edition (up-to-date)
• My hardware is Intel i7 -9700 with a GTX 1669Ti

The consistent thread of everyone who has posted over the year that this has been happening is that the icons disappoear when coming out of Sleep mode. You would hope that there's someone with enough brains at Microsoft to work it out........

Re-starting the Windows Explorer process fixes it when it happens, but problem re-appears later. So it is not a permanent fix.

Recently experiencing this problem after installing Update for 22H2 for x64-based Systems (KB4023057). The issue manifests for me after resuming from sleep state.

Re-starting the Windows Explorer process fixes it. As reported by others.