Taskbar disappears upon startup. Explorer crash?

H4ttrick

Honorable
Dec 30, 2013
16
0
10,510
Ask your questionI updated my Avast antivirus and had to reboot system. I hit reboot and went to bed. Next morning system had frozen up at some point so I rebooted again.

This time when windows booted up, the start button and task bar appear and then promptly vanish. The wallpaper is visible, the mouse cursor is visible and turns to an hourglass from time to time. Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing, hitting the start key on my keyboard does nothing, right clicking does nothing. I can still move the mouse cursor around and it turns to an hourglass from time to time but nothing else.

This happens every time I boot up. I have tried numerous reboots. I even tried to reboot in most recent working config and the same thing happened.
 

H4ttrick

Honorable
Dec 30, 2013
16
0
10,510


Yes. I can boot in safe mode. I tried a system restore from safe mode and the OS booted up and said a restore cannot be performed. The restore window was up but the taskbar had disappeared again. I was able to use Ctrl+Alt+Del to get the task manager up and killed and restarted explorer. That caused the taskbar to stay up. I tried rebooting from this working point and got the same results as earlier. My next step, unless guided otherwise, is an OS repair with my installation CD.
 

Krishna Moorthy

Honorable
Dec 27, 2013
675
0
11,160


umm what windows are you running :p you never said

scratch that i jsut saw the win xp tag. never mind waht i was going to say only applies to 7 and 8