My Taskbar is missing and I have no Start button - what do I do?

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This has been happening for little over a week. When I turn on my laptop, everything's fine. My toolbar is there, it's all good. Then, when it's all booted up, the toolbar disappears. I've tried everything. I tried the task manager thing, but nothing happened. I don't want to restart windows, because I'll lose all my files. It's so annoying! I can maneuver alright, I can use ctrl+tab to switch from window to window and the windows logo button to access my start key, but I never know what time it is and the tab trick gets annoying.

Thank You Leo......My taskbar is restored Your Amazing!!!!!

I can't tell you how good it is to type in "where did my start button go on vista" and actually find you there to help. Many thanks I've bookmarked you and bought you your favorite drink.

oh man thanks for the help. We had a virus so we ran anti-virus and when we did it all dissapeared as did the icons. Its bheen a month and this is the only place i found the answer. just typing explorer in worked. thanks

whew, ctrl alt del works... thanks a lot...

Leo's recipe for how to get the task bar back is nearly correct. At first I got the same result as
"Posted by: Asif at March 9, 2009 3:46 PM" in that an explorer window opened showing My Documents. Then I kept looking through my google hits page and found an article at Windows Annoyances that said I needed to close all visible Explorer windows first. So I did Alt-Tab enough times to get to each explorer window and closed them all. Then when I tried Leo's recipe, it worked :-)
Apparently when explorer.exe starts up, it checks to see if another instance of itself is running already. If not, it turns itself into a taskbar window at the bottom of the screen, otherwise it opens an ordinary explorer window displaying My Documents. Clever behaviour in a program, but confusing for us humans.
Thanks Leo, perhaps you could add "close any open explorer windows" to your recipe.

Jim

THANK YOU SOO SOOO SOOOOO MUCH! I must abmit I don't really know much about computers,but through trial and error i've been teaching myself. When I got on and couldn't find my taskbar nor did I see my icons,I thought i'd lost my computer! lol Your site made it easy and simple to follow and I got it! Thanks!

None of your suggestions worked, but it was a learning experience trying them. I finally got fed up that under normal bootup I had no mouse or keyboard control. Ctrl-Esc and Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing. I got so fed up after multiple reinstalls, etc., that I shook the mouse violently. And then from the edge of the screen, the mouse pointer appeared. Was this computer setup with 2 monitors? This computer had been hooked up to two monitors at some point under the local administrator profile, although not for years under the current user's profile. Safe mode was coming up fine, but the extended desktop was on and the monitors were switched. I moved my test monitor to the other monitor port and there was my desktop. Back in business!

I tried all of the above and somehow it won't work.I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and brought up the Task Manager and typed in explorer,instead it brought up My Documents.I can't do no spyware check because I don't have any installed on my computer and can't find any that is good enough.Any advice?PLEASE!

THANK YOU THANK YOU SOO MUCH I HAD NO TASK BAR NO START BUTTON OR MENU AFTER SERVICE PACK 2 UPDATE
RAN MALAWARE BYTES VIRUSDETECTION IT FOUND 4 TROJANS
IT REMOVED THEM AND BOOM THERE WAS THE START MENU
AND TASK BAR THANK YOU SO MUCH

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