The Start Button is Missing and There's No Taskbar, What Do I Do?
Hi everyone Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. If you're viewing this somewhere that has a “Like”
button when you get to the end of the video why don't you give that thing a hit? That really does
help everyone, including me of course, but it helps others find what they're looking for when
they're searching for their answers. So you come across a Windows machine and it's running. Windows
is clearly running, but there's no taskbar. What the heck? Let me show you a couple of the
different things that could be happening, and some of the things you can do to get it back.
So here's my Windows 10 Pro machine. And you'll see that, of course, Windows is running. It's
fine, but there's no taskbar. The first thing I would have you do is hit the Windows key. And sure
enough there's the start menu and the taskbar. All that really means is that the taskbar was hidden
by a setting. Now we'll look at that setting in a minute, but the other way to get it back
is of course just to move your mouse down to the bottom. And once you do, there it is, and you can
start interacting with whatever is on the taskbar. And of course you can hit the start menu by
hitting the start button. The setting that's been changed here? I’ll go ahead and right click on the
task bar, click on Taskbar Settings. The setting that's turned on here is this Automatically Hide
the Taskbar in Desktop Mode. Literally it hides the taskbar so you don't see it. It gives you that
little bit of extra screen real estate for your applications to use and only shows you the taskbar
when you hit the Windows key or when your mouse moves to that last row or last line on the screen.
So I’m going to leave that turned on here just because it's a convenient way to use the entire
screen. So what if that didn't work? What would you do? What could you do… the start button
didn't do anything, the Windows key doesn't do anything. You move your mouse around the bottom,
there's still no taskbar. The next thing to do is to type Control Alt Delete.
You can see that that switched us to this screen that allows us to do
a couple of different things. The thing we're going to care about here is Task Manager.
There's Task Manager. Now I want the version that has More Details because it also has more
functionality. So here's Task Manager running. So click on File, Run, New task. Now the task I’m
going to suggest you run is explorer. Now that may seem counterintuitive and here's why. This machine
is working, there isn't a problem. So if I run Explorer we'll get Windows File Explorer. However
Windows File Explorer is also responsible for the taskbar and the start menu. If for some reason
it's not running at all then running it using task manager will cause the start menu and the
taskbar to reappear. If that still didn't work, if running explorer did not bring you to a Windows
start menu or a task bar, then we're kind of out of luck. We don't have a lot of things to try.
What I recommend is that you run your anti-malware tools and perform a full scan.
Now you might ask well how do I do that if I can't access the taskbar or the start menu? Well
unless you happen to have a shortcut on the desktop, and you'll notice that I don't here,
you can run things via the command line. Because that is in fact all that File,
Run New Task is all about. Now if you want to run Windows Defender then you end up running
%ProgramFiles%\Windows Defender\MpCmdRun.exe, with a couple of options here: -Scan -ScanType 2.
I’m going to go ahead and create this task with administrative privileges and let it run.
Now you can see the scan is starting and it's going to perform a full scan on my machine.
Needless to say, that's going to take some time. Now assuming that the anti-malware scan you run
doesn't turn anything up then nothing will have been repaired. Of course the next thing I would
run is the System File Checker. I have an article “What Is the System File Checker, and How Do I Run
It?”. It's another command line utility that you would run using task manager's Run New Task. Next
if that doesn't work then I’d attempt a refresh of Windows 10 itself using one of the techniques I’ve
got outlined in “Refreshing Windows 10 Without a Reinstall or Reset”. Of course if that still
fails then your only option could be reinstalling Windows from scratch and the article on that is
“How Do I Reset Windows 10?”. But hopefully one of these tools, one of these techniques will get
you back your taskbar your start menu and let you diagnose your problems from there. For updates,
for links related to all this, including the article on which this video is based, for comments
and more visit askleo.com/2529. I’m Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.