Has your Windows Taskbar disappeared?

Posted on March 28, 2009 at 5:18 am

This is a mystery for most Windows users. You are working on your stuff… documents, pictures, music… and then out of the blue, the taskbar along with the Windows Start button disappears! You get shocked and you might panic if the document you are working on is on another inactive window which you can’t access now that the taskbar is missing.

Well you can still access the other windows using ALT-TAB but do you know that you can recover from this mishap without restarting your computer?

clip_image002

If you experience this problem, most likely your Windows Explorer process crashed. To restart the Windows Explorer process, press control-alt-delete to open the task manager:

Under the applications tab click “New Task…”

clip_image004

Then enter “explorer” on the “open” field. Click OK to start explorer.

clip_image006

You should see the taskbar along with the start button, quick launch and system tray come up again.

By the way, the tips above can be used to run other applications like how the Run command works in Windows:

clip_image008

If this didn’t solve your problem, it must be that the taskbar is automatically hidden or dragged down.  To make sure you don’t set the auto-hide option, uncheck the box next to “auto-hide the taskbar” in the properties panel of the taskbar:

image

Also try to drag the taskbar border up the screen to make sure it is not moved beyond the bottom of your screen. 

I hope the tips above solve your missing taskbar problems.  Do you other ways to recover a missing taskbar? Post them on the comments section!

Ben shows you how it’s done.

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Related Posts

Comments

2 Responses to “Has your Windows Taskbar disappeared?”

  1. Deyaa Addeen Fahmy Shedeed said on : March 28th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

    Thanks.


  2. Nat said on : March 29th, 2009 at 11:10 am

    Great tip!

    A related problem: sometimes I’m adjusting the order of programs on the quick launch bar and the task bar doubles up in size, half for the quick launch and half for the open tasks. Try as I can, I can’t get them to consolidate again. The little sizer widgets don’t move…, trying to drag the bars downward only hides them both. I fiddle and fiddle and something finally works, but as far as I can tell I’m just repeating the same obvious dragging over and over. Any sure fire methods?


Please post your comments/suggestions!