Windows says 1 notification for me ... but there are none

I don't have "show notifications from these apps".

The picture I posted earlier shows:
"Get notifications from these senders"
And beneath that:
"No senders have provided notifications yet."
There's nothing there to click on!

Does the latter imply that I should get NO notifications at all?
Because I DO get notifications about Windows updates and some other things. So I puzzled.

das10 said:

I do it this way:
Start Menu > Settings > System > Notifications and Actions > show notiications from these apps
Then, if you click on any of the individual app icons in the list there are further options including "play sound".

You should be able to see a whole list of apps in the settings menu I am referring to (at least I am). See if you can see them by following the instructions in this link :

How to configure and block specific Windows 10 apps from sharing notifications | Digital Citizen

The key part of your referenced web page is Get notifications from these senders ... and I see that on my screen.

But on the referenced web page, there appears a list of applications (like AutoPlay, Battery saver, etc), each with a slide switch.

I don't get that on my screen. Instead it says No senders have provided notifications yet.

So this question is not about how to set notifications. Instead it's about how to fix my seemingly broken notification system.

You need to look in Settings > System > Notifications & actions > Scroll down to Notifications > "Get notifications from apps and other senders" > ON.
Otherwise the next section is all greyed out.
"Get notifications from these apps"

In that long list of Apps (*missing in yours) the ones that are ON, click to get more options.
e.g. on the Mail App
You have a load more options like, Show notification banners, lock screen, show notifications in Action Centre, Sound, number visible in Action Centre, priority.
What options you get depend on the App.

The Quick Actions are more or less ON/OFF buttons for various functions you choose to put in there.

* Because of all those missing items there must be something wrong so you will have to repair Windows, Troubleshoot Apps or something.
System file check SFC, DISM etc. Guides are on here.

So I rebooted ... and now the "1" notification in the tray is gone.
And in the control panel the section called Get notifications from these apps has a bunch of items, as you said it should.

You said that if the problem crops up again I should look at the event viewer.
I have that opened now ... and there are lots of things to look at.
Where would I look for something amiss?

This is a long shot, but:

Hopefully, if are any apps there for which you have set them to play a sound when they create a notification to alert you, then if you look at event viewer near about the TIME you hear the notification (or notice the blank notification) it MAY give you an indication of what application created the notification.

(Setting apps to play a sound is just to alert you in case you don't notice the notification when it happens).


You can also try ExecutedProgramsList from nirsoft, to see if it helps.

ExecutedProgramsList - Shows programs previously executed on your system

As I said this is just a long shot and may or may not help you!

Best of luck.

OK ... but where in event viewer do I look. There are many cryptic items there that don't mean anything to me.
It would be great to see an event called "Your notification subsystem has failed". But I doubt there will be any such event.
So ... what should I look for?

The general idea is that if you know the "time" of the blank notification, you look in the Event Manager (under Windows logs\Application) for events recorded at that particular "time" and IF you are lucky you would find the name of the Application that created a notification. Then, if you do find an application creating the blank notification you would be one step closer to solving your mystery.

see: How to use Event Viewer to check on the Application events
How to work with the Event Viewer in Windows | Digital Citizen

If this doesn't help, I am sorry, I am out of ideas.

I'd try running ShadowPlay recording all the time so it catches the time when the notification appears so you'll know what it is when watching the video

I finally found my fix.
From the command line I can run sc query state= all
If I search the results for these two strings: WpnService and WpnUserService_.
... I get two names: WpnService and WpnUserService_7e8d2
The name of the latter one will vary from time to time. In this case the suffix is 7e8d2. Next time it might be different.

Anyway ... if I run these four commands, all is well again.
net stop WpnService
net start WpnService
net stop WpnUserService_7e8d2
net start WpnUserService_7e8d2

Since I run Cygwin (a Linux emulator), I wrapped up all of that into a script:

Code:

for item in WpnService WpnUserService_
do
  service_name=$(sc query state= all | d2u | grep "$item" | grep "^SERVICE" | sed -e "s/.*: //")
  echo "$service_name"
  echo "y" | net stop  "$service_name"
  echo "y" | net start "$service_name"
done
exit 0