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

Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this article.

OK,

I had something similar just now. After minimizing an individual window inside of Adobe Acrobat that was stretched across two unequal sized screens, the whole program window disappeared as well. It was not closed (I could ALT-Tab it). The Taskbar disappeared as wel.

The only thing that worked was the Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) and stopping Explorer, then File > New Task . "explorer". Popped back up.

Unusual error, but what can I say....

HEY GUYS LISTEN
THIS IS WHAT YOU DO IF THE EXPLORER THING MENTIONED ABOVE DOES NOT WORK...PRess Control/Alt/Delete and bring up the window. Then go to the Processes and scroll down....until u see 'explorer.exe'
click it and then press 'end process'.
THEN go to New task (Run...) in the File menu and type in explorer.exe...It will come now.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! I lived with the inconvenience of now taskbar and having to use the task manager to start everything for three months before I founds this! Thanks!

check to be sure you are only on one screen and not two togle + - on your monitor if it shows up
with no icons its on dual screens
go to screen resolutions and highlight 1 screen
and uncheck boxes accordingly

I lost my taskbar and discovered by clicking on "tools" on the command bar at the top of the screen that I had inadvertently checked "full screen". When I unchecked it, the task bar came back.

pls pls help me.. i've tried everything.. when i type explorer.. what pops out is my documents folder.. i tried to kill the explorer.exe process before attempting to run explorer again but still my documents folder is the one appearing.. my family's a paranoid.. they'd be shocked if they can't find the desktop shortcuts, start menu and the taskbar.. PLS PLS HELP ME!!

The cause of this problem for me was the computer thinking I had two monitors installed. I believe that this happened because I had used a utility that created multiple virtual desktops. To correct the problems I went to Desktop->Properties->Settings Tab and selected the monitor that I did NOT want in the drop list and unchecked "Extend my windows desktop onto this monitor". This page was very helpful to me in identifying the problem.

THank you so much. I had been missing my taskbar for a long time now and go use to not having it around. Thanks to stumble i randomly found this page.

Response to Scott, articles first comment. Your 2nd monitor solution fixed it all. Thanks man

I work in a school in the computer lab and the cause of my taskbar disappearing seems to be a program called JumpStart Second Grade created by Knowledge Adventure. This is a very annoying problem for the whole class!!!!

To post a comment on "My Taskbar is missing and I have no Start button - what do I do?", please return to that article's main page.