Icons used to be on taskbar?

flycaster · 24 Dec 2015

HP Envy desktop came with Windows 10 Home already loaded. Set it up with my program shorcut icons in the taskbar. Everything working just fine for days, and then all of a sudden (well maybe not as I had just installed updates from MS) the taskbar no longer shows those icons and the Windows Start/Search/taskview icons on the left and the HP Support/Notification icons on the right show but all are inactive. Looked t some of the responses on this forum, but didn't try any of them (except starting explorer which made no difference) as they may not be pertinent to my problem. Help certainly appreciated.

davidhk · 24 Dec 2015

There can be a few possible solutions.
Let's start with a more "standard, traditional" solution............
Do a system restore. Pick a date when you did NOT have this problem as your restore point.
System Restore Windows 10

If that works, case close.
If not, we'll try next possible solution.

flycaster · 24 Dec 2015

davidhk said:

There can be a few possible solutions.
Let's start with a more "standard, traditional" solution............
Do a system restore. Pick a date when you did NOT have this problem as your restore point.
System Restore Windows 10

If that works, case close.
If not, we'll try next possible solution.

I may try your suggestion when I have time tomorrow and will be able to better handle the ensuing aggravation. However, there is another wrinkle to report on this problem. I now note that when I pass the cursor through the blackened taskbar, I will see the light outline of boxes and holding the cursor over these boxes will bring up...nothing showing in the boxes, but their names do show on hovering and when left clicked, the program becomes activated. Also, when right clicking on these shadow icons in the taskbar, nothing happens. Hopefully, this new bit of info may help in the fix.

EDIT: I always thought that one can choose a recent restore point and get back everything that was there at that point in time. However, I've also been told that if use restore here, I'll go back to the beginning and have lost all my tweaking/editing??? So, I'm holding off. Perhaps, your net suggestion ?

flycaster · 27 Dec 2015

Well, I don't really know what did it, but everything is back to normal. The normalization occurred when I was fooling around with the Logitech driver for Setpoint. Actually tried to roll it back to a previous version. But I as the newest version is still on, I think that I must have deleted and reinstalled. Original version could have been corrupted??? Google searches have shown this driver and Win 10 to have issues.

davidhk · 27 Dec 2015

Ok. So surprisingly you are back in business. That's great.

As to your question about system restore:
When you pick a restore point ( date ), you roll back to the date you have chosen. Any programs and updates you had installed AFTER that date will be nullified and you will need to reinstall those.
Programs and updates that were installed BEFORE that date are unaffected and will stay as is.

flycaster · 27 Dec 2015

davidhk said:

Ok. So surprisingly you are back in business. That's great.

As to your question about rstore:
When you pick a restore point ( date ), you roll back to the date you have chosen. Any programs and updates you had installed AFTER that date will be nullified and you will need to reinstall those.
Programs and updates that were installed BEFORE that date are unaffected and will stay as is.

Thanks for the follow-up on restore. Actually, I got confused because someone who I was working with mis-interpreted restore to restore from the beginning...he was confused and confused me....

davidhk · 27 Dec 2015

Yes, there are still people mistaken system restore with system recovery.

Happy Holidays.

flycaster · 01 Jan 2016

Taskbar malfunction (icons on taskbar disappeared) and started to get the Setpoint Runtime Error again. Looking at Post #4, I see that I was fooling around with Setpoint (6.6.83/5.90.41) at the time when the taskbar icons came back, so I tried to uninstall Setpoint and then reload it. Well, Setpoint didn't appear to respond to multiple tries using its uninstaller and Googling showed that one had to use more of a process. Being, naturally lazy, I figured I would just try to re-install Setpoint (6.7.83/5.90.41) over the existing Setpoint. Believe it or not, the taskbar icons came back, my Logitech Trackman i working, and no runtime errors. As for Setpoint runtime errors, I am fearful that they may return as this is what happened after he first time I thought the problem was solved.