Icons Keep Disappearing From Taskbar - Windows 11

Logged in to say that this has been happening since about November 2023 after the windows update that added the option to group and ungroup taskbar icons. Since then, the issue keeps happening. It seems to start a few minutes after a fresh reboot and is triggered by changing virtual desktops or waking the computer from sleep. Icons become invisible at random and become visible again after changing virtual desktop (Random) or manually clicking them twice (when they do the little jump animation as the window is minimized). It might have something to do with the animations of the taskbar as well.

I tried all solutions in this thread and others, from sfc /scannow, repair health, deleting iconcache and thumbcache from AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Explorer, renaming the regex folders for file associations with .png and .ico files, nothing worked after a reboot.

The only thing that works is pinning icons to the taskbar. When an icon is pinned, it will never disappear for some reason... Still, it's not feasible to pin every single application I'll ever use to the taskbar. Microsoft, get your act together and fix this issue that's been plaguing so many users since 2022!

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

I agree with the advice to avoid the "deep engineering" fixes that sometime appear. The only reliable method (without a re-boot) seems to be to restart Explorer in Task Manager. Annoying, irritating and irksome - and its been going on for Sooooo... long now.

I have two computers running Windows 11, a laptop and a desktop. Both have this issue. I believe the laptop had this issue right after doing a clean install. Probably the 1st or 2nd boot.

I have previously used the restart explorer.exe method to fix it. I also use multiple virtual desktops and switching between them sometimes is the cause of the issue, but is also sometimes the fix.

As such, I would advise everyone to stay away from invasive "fixes" like dsm repair or OS upgrade, or a reinstall. Most likely it will happen again regardless. I can't believe how MS cannot fix such a small bug in the most used UI of the OS for so long.

For anyone wanting a permanent fix, I think you'll have to install Windows 10...

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme which I methodically keep up-to-date on latest Windows 11 version, BIOS, drivers, etc, since I'm an obsessed app designer type. I've had this problem since updating to Windows 11 last year. Not always, just sometimes. It seems to be associated with a period of sleep or hibernation. Some icons disappear from the task bar and leave spaces. However, the button areas are still active normally. When hovering over them, they show the task label. After selecting a hidden one and opening the task, the icon usually reappears.

This is an irritating behavior, but I can live with it because other than no icon, things work normally and they seem to come back on their own. My point in writing this post is to tell Microsoft that it's definitely THEIR problem, not the user's. So if you have the problem, you should probably not bother spending hours trying to fix it. Microsoft, if you can't fix it, at least add a right'click drop down selection on the task bar called "Refresh Task Bar" to restore icons.