This bug keeps coming back regardless of Windows 10 version

Jan 3, 2020 13:49 GMT  ·  By

In addition to the desktop context menus that sometime appear under the taskbar, there’s another long-time bug in Windows 10 that keeps happening on various devices out there (and which I personally experienced a few months ago): taskbar icons go blank all of a sudden.

If this bug occurs, the taskbar icons themselves are not removed, and you can still interact with them, only that instead of the icon what you see is blank taskbar space.

It doesn’t really matter what Windows 10 version you are running because similar problems have been reported on both old and new OS releases – for example, some users come across the same issue on Windows 10 November 2019 Update (version 1909), which is the latest version, but I previously experienced it in the April 2018 Update as well.

There are several ways to (try to) fix this, and the most effective method is actually to free up disk space.

When you are running out of disk space, the icon cache is no longer correctly loaded, so make sure that you have at least 1GB of free storage on your device. Remove temporary or unnecessary files and reboot the device and then the taskbar icons should be there. In some cases, a system restart isn’t even required, as the icons return following an automatic refresh.

In fact, rebooting the system isn’t necessary even if you want to kill the explorer process. This is a workaround that forces the taskbar to reload the icons that it must display, and doing this is obviously much faster and more convenient than rebooting the computer because you’re not losing anything and you can continue working after the problem is fixed.

There are multiple ways to do this, and one of them comes to this (press enter after each command):


taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
--
explorer
You can also restart the explorer process by pressing:
CTRL + SHIFT + Right click on taskbar > Exit Explorer
Next, you need to click:
Task Manager > File > Run new task > explorer.exe
After killing the explorer process, you should see the taskbar going away completely and features like Night light disabling.

Removing certain software could also help, as some users claim that Google Drive File Stream is known for causing such issues. I can’t confirm this, however, as I’ve never experienced problems with Drive File Stream, but if this works, make sure you drop us a line at the end of the article.

In many cases, a simple reboot fixes the bug, but it then keeps coming back just because the reboot itself only removes the temporary files and thus frees up some disk space. When the disk gets full again, the bug returns, so freeing up space manually is the first thing you should try.

Scanning the drive for errors is another recommended step, as corrupt files, such as the icon cache, could also cause similar problems. Some said that the taskbar icons come back after a few minutes, but this of course doesn’t happen to everybody, and waiting is clearly not a solution.

All in all, there’s no guaranteed fix for this problem because it has different causes, but the aforementioned steps could come in handy when trying to deal with it. As I said, the bug happens on all Windows 10 versions, and judging from reports posted by users online, it takes place mostly on devices with limited storage, which once again confirms that freeing up space is once easy way to resolve it.