Taskbar Icon Troubles

Am having a frustrating problem with my taskbar, the icons keep disappearing after I reboot/shutdown the machine. Today the problem seems to be getting worse in that I can no longer (permanently) pin items to the taskbar. When the applications are open they appear there correctly, but if I close them they disappear from the taskbar.

Computer is an Asus ROG laptop, with Win10 Home. I've got 2 monitors hooked up to it, so its not running in tablet mode (which seems to be the only thing that normally causes this problem). Have also tried pinning the applications to the taskbar from the start menu with right clicking them from there and choosing "pin to start". Afterwards there is no change to the taskbar. Have right clicked on the exe files in the file explorer, chosen pin to start and then watched nothing change on the taskbar.

Prior to today I could restart explorer.exe from the run command and my pinned icons would show back up. Now that isn't working so am at a loss on where the actual problem might be. Any help/suggestions are appreciated at this point.

Check operating system integrity, drive, user id,interfering services

Open administrative command prompt and type or copy and paste these commands:
1) sfc /scannow
2) dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
3) chkdsk /scan
4) net user test /add
5) shutdown /r
When the computer reboots log on with the new user named test.
Check the problems with the task bar to see if the are present or absent.

Additional options if problems persist after creating a new user:
place computer in clean boot > check performance
place computer in safe mode > check performance
perform in place upgrade repair and save files and applications

Let us know the results of steps 1 -5 and if you need additional help.

My apologies for the slow reply, this has been an extremely busy week for my line of work. With the steps outlined I didn't receive any errors, everything completed successfully. Here were the results:

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.15063]
(c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\WINDOWS\system32> sfc /scannow

Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.

Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.15063.0

Image Version: 10.0.15063.0

[==========================100.0%==========================] The restore operation completed successfully.
The operation completed successfully.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

124492796 KB total disk space.
62644716 KB in 124391 files.
93740 KB in 30135 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
449820 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
61304520 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
31123199 total allocation units on disk.
15326130 allocation units available on disk.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>


When I logged into the test account, the icons that should be there (from the OS clean install defaults) on the taskbar were there, and remained after I rebooted. I added a few to the taskbar to test them out, and they remained after reboot.

What then became odd was that when I logged out of the test, and then went into my normal account the pinned icons correctly loaded; then on reboot disappeared again.

I used to be in IT, but have been out of it for nearly 10 years now, Windows 7 was the last OS I really knew inside and out. To me it seems like a corrupted profile, would it be best to just create a new one and nuke my current one? Its a local account so aside from copying files over don't think I'll have much to loose, would that be best?

The steps have confirmed that the operating system is ok.
The steps have confirmed that the user profile is corrupt.
The easiest method is to use a new user profile.
If you are comfortable navigating the registry the user profile can be fixed.
However in most circumstances the new user profile is the most efficient and effective method as it solves the problem immediately with little if any risk.