Taskbar mysteriously disappeared

[learninmypc]

Last night (02/19/14) I went to bed & left my Vista Home Premium laptop on which I've done several times before only this time ,next morning when I moved my mouse to start surfing, no taskbar. No, I don't have it set to auto-hide,either.
I used Ctrl-Alt- Del to bring up the Task Manager but was unable to see how to reboot it using the Task Manager. I now can't remember what I did, but I got to a blueish screen giving me options on whether I wanted it to hibernate,switch user,etc, etc. I clicked on one of them, clicked my name & it rebooted.
I don't know how to find the Event viewer if that is what I needed to look at, so , what could of caused this? I know his laptop aint the best, but I'm glad it works as good as it does.

 

[cliffordcooley]

That resembles Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) crash. Though when I have seen them in the past Windows has always recovered or rebooted on its own. I've never been kicked out to the login screen. That could be due to the fact I never see the login screen, my PC boots straight to desktop.

If someone uses the login screen, an explorer.exe crash might recover and start back at the login screen. But I couldn't say for sure if this is what would happen.

I've even had instances where Explorer seemed to freeze. I still had mouse control but nothing worked from the taskbar. Starting task manager and killing explorer.exe, would manually initiate the recovery. The taskbar will disappear and then reappear. During these instances are the only time, I have been able to kill the explorer.exe process, without Windows shutting down.

 

[learninmypc]

Gollie, I wish I would of known that, I would of tried it. I thank you for the speedy reply & if it happens again, I'll try killing explorer.exe and also remembering what I did to get it back up, thank you.

 

[St1ckM4n]

If you open task manager you can File>New>explorer.exe to re-launch it.

 

[learninmypc]

Thank you.

 

[bazz2004]

Very occasionally on start-up my XP desktop goes from the Windows log-in to a desktop background with nothing else displayed. Starting up Task Manager with Control, Alt, Delete then logging-off and logging-in by-passes the issue. I'll have a look at explorer.exe when it happens again.

 

[learninmypc]

Well, last night I decided to shut it down before going to bed. I wake up this morning , 6 hours later & its still shutting down. I was forced to pull the power cord & battery. I booted it up & was given the option to boot up normally or a repair option, I chose normally, it didn't. I chose a repair (recommended) & it went thru a repair process & it just now rebooted normally. Strange if you ask me. I'm not going to expect it too last much longer.

 

[learninmypc]

Ok, I got everything off this Vista so if it decides to die, I've lost nothing.

 

[learninmypc]

 

[learninmypc]

When Ihad to reboot to the repair (recommended) option this morning, this this what I saw

 

[learninmypc]

@cliffordcooley & @St1ckM4n ,any thought/ideas/suggestions?

 

[cliffordcooley]

It is hard to say. Looks as if the drive is having read write errors. Could be drive or cable issues if that is the case. Memory or CPU issues would more than likely cause other symptoms. Still yet, I wouldn't worry unless it becomes repetitious.

 

[learninmypc]

Ok. So far no problems rebooting or shuting it down since then. Hopefully it has recovered. Thank you.

 

[St1ckM4n]

Run a CHKDSK:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...n-chkdsk/a68b3e4d-1a42-e011-9767-d8d385dcbb12

 

[learninmypc]

Run a CHKDSK:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...n-chkdsk/a68b3e4d-1a42-e011-9767-d8d385dcbb12

Ok, I thougt I'd defrag it using defraggler & it said disk health good. So I'm in the process of defragging it as I type. After that, I'll run the check disk,thanks.

 

[learninmypc]

Run a CHKDSK:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...n-chkdsk/a68b3e4d-1a42-e011-9767-d8d385dcbb12

It looked good to my untrained eye. Only took a few minutes. Thank you.

 

[St1ckM4n]

Did your computer reboot? It needs to reboot and do this before Windows loads - so you should have seen the black screen with white font.

 

[learninmypc]

Did your computer reboot? It needs to reboot and do this before Windows loads - so you should have seen the black screen with white font.

Yes,it did reboot & gave me X amount of seconds to exit before it started. I let it go & a few minutes later it finished & rebooted back to the desktop, thank you.

 

[captaincranky]

In my experience, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. (Of course, as always your results may vary).

First, it's far from unheard of that a machine left running, unattended, does something off the wall. Prolonged standby can also, from time to time have some unintended consequences

If Windows locks up, I just hold the power switch in, and kill the machine.

In the case of Vista or Windows 7, the machine will either restore the machine to its prior state, or lead you to a black start screen which asks what state you would like Windows restored.

XP doesn't bother with trying to save anything, and reboots.

So, if you're still missing the Taskbar after a cold start, then you do have problems. OTOH, you can right click and create new taskbars, (or rather toolbars), and there is always the potential for an errant byte to wreak temporary havoc.

 

[St1ckM4n]

Plus it's Vista, which is a piece of junk.