Odd behavior for desktop taskbar buttons

I think I posted about this before with no solution, but I discovered another element that I hope will be familiar to someone or lead to an answer.

This only affects desktop taskbar buttons to file explorer folders, not buttons to programs or browsers.

I will click on a file explorer taskbar button expecting it to open the window, and nothing happens. It could be only one or two buttons among multiple buttons currently residing on the taskbar, but there is no response when they are clicked, while the remaining buttons work properly. It is random. There is no pattern I can see, but sometimes seem to occur coincidentally when I have my Firefox chrome folder open. What that indicates, I don't know.

I can right click on the individual button and choose "close window" from the drop down menu. When reopened, it will behave normally. It is more likely to reoccur for the same window, or may not.

Another odd thing I found. Normally, when you do a mouse over on any one of multiple taskbar buttons to display the multiple thumbnails, you can select the thumbnail and open the window by left clicking on the thumbnail. But when I have a button that refuses to open, the thumbnail related to it is unresponsive as well to a left click.

However, If I right click on it, the window opens. Weird.

I just did a fresh reinstall. It was happening before, and it's happening again. My system is simple and clean. The setting "Combine Taskbar Buttons" is set to "never".

I'm hoping someone recognizes something about this.

thanks

I'd think this was likely an add-on that's broken some of the explorer.exe operation.
What 3rd party software do you have installed?

Wait until the problem happens (if you can make it happen, make it happen several times)
Then:
Open Event Viewer (Start...Run...eventvwr.msc)
Expand the Custom Views category in the left sidebar (left click on the >)
Right click on Administrative Events
Then, click on "Save all events in custom view as..."
Save as Admin.evtx on your Desktop (If it asks, tell it you don't want any "Display Information")
Right click on it and select "Send To...", then select "Compressed (zipped) folder"
Then upload that zipped folder to your next post.

Do you have Classic Shell installed?

Megahertz said:

Do you have Classic Shell installed?

No, and I have very little installed. Very basic stuff, really.

I did a fresh install...put back the same as before. We'll see.

Thanks for the help.