Missing the taskbar. How to return?

If the taskbar is gone, do not rush to panicand do a system rollback or reinstall the OS: maybe not everything is as bad as it seems. If the desktop is missing only the taskbar, and all shortcuts and gadgets in place, most likely, taskbar is just hidden.

To re-display the taskbar, you need to move the mouse cursor to the place where itwas (the standard location is at the bottom of the screen). If the taskbar does not appear, move the cursor to the top of the screen and to the sides: perhaps the panel has simply been moved. The cursor should be moved to the very edge of the screen.

How to make the taskbar no longer disappear? To do this, you need disable hiding the taskbar. To do this, go to the Control Panel(Start - Control Panel) and select "Taskbar and Start Menu." Alternatively, you can right-click on the taskbar and select the "Properties" item. In the window that opens, uncheck the box "Automatically hide the taskbar" and click OK.

If the taskbar disappears when you start Windows XP, it is probably the fault of that damage to user account settings. "Symptoms" of this problem are not displayedwhen logging in the system taskbar and the inability to open the Start menu by pressing the Ctrl + Escape key combination. If you go to Windows in safe mode, the taskbar is displayed.

there is several ways to solve this problem:

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  Run Windows in a clean boot mode witha minimal set of drivers - perhaps, a driver loaded by a certain program and there is a reason that the taskbar has disappeared (video adapter drivers usually cause this problem). If so, you just need to remove the problem drivers.




• 
  Login to the system as an administrator and create a new user account in place of the damaged one.




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  If the previous methods did not help, follow theSystem Restore. In this case, all damaged Windows files will be replaced with normal ones, and your personal files and installed programs will remain untouched.

If you do not just lost the taskbar, but did not boot up the desktop (icons, gadgets, etc.), it means that could not execute explorer.exe process. We already described the ways to solve this problem in the article "The desktop does not load. What should I do? ", But just in case, we will repeat the main points.

To start run Task Managerusing Ctrl + Alt + Delete orCtrl + Shift + Escape. On the File menu, click New Task (Run ...), type explorer.exe, and then click OK. The desktop should return to the place along with the taskbar.

After this, you must scan the system for viruses, and also check the registry for the presence of keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsNTC currentVersionImage File Execution Optionsexplorer.exe and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsNTC currentVersionImage File Execution Optionsiexplorer.exe. If these keys are present, delete them.

So, if you have lost the taskbar, it is worthwhile to suspect three main reasons:

• 
  someone turned on the automatic taskbar hiding;


• 
  the user account in Windows XP has been corrupted;


• 
  The process explorer.exe did not run, most likely because of the virus.

If the "soft" ways of combatingproblem (creating a new account, removing defective drivers, cleaning up the system from viruses), you still do not need to rush to reinstall the system. Better try to restore the system, by rolling back to one of the created restore points, then you do not have to reinstall all the programs.