Icons Keep Disappearing From Taskbar - Windows 11

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 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

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!

Pinning icons to taskbar (or unpinning them and then repinning them) does not always help either.

For example, on my systems (a desktop and a laptop) the entire taskbar becomes invisible when the system goes into Sleep Mode and then awakens from Sleep.

I then need to right-click the Desktop, select Display Settings, select Advanced Display, change the refresh rate and revert it. Then the taskbar reappears, with all icons visible.

Sadly, even your idea of pinning to the task bar doesn't work for me. All my icons s are pinned.... but when ever the system comes back from Sleep it seems pretty random whether all, some or none of the icons are there!