Explorer process loses icons and funtionality

[DestructoS]

Hi I am running Win 8.1 upgraded from 8
Every now and then all the icons on my taskbar start to disappear and it loses all functionality I can not click the start menu button or right click the taskbar.
I have to restart the process to get them back which doesn't worry me that much as I have written a program that makes it 2 clicks to restart it.
My desktop icons are still fine and my desktop wallpaper slide show still works, also I don't see anything regarding this in my event logs.
It's not a huge inconvenience but I would like to fix it.
Any help would be appreciated thanks.

 

[1YvD87rvsE0X]

I have experienced a similar issue as well. This seems to occur after watching a full screen flash video, usually from youtube. Once I restore or minimize the full screen flash video my taskbar sometimes becomes very distorted and cannot be used until explorer.exe is restarted. For me, simply clicking where the windows icon would be, in the bottom left corner of my screen, restarts the explorer process and taskbar functionality returns. Unfortunately I do not have any fix, sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't...

I am currently running Flash 14.0.0.179 and haven't noticed a recent occurrence of this issue.

 

[David Bailey]

Have you tried sfc & dism ?

I run them from a batch file AS ADMINISTRATOR---



or you could run them 1 by 1.

 

[DestructoS]

I run sfc very often just to make sure things are ok. I will check about if there is a flash update and if that doesn't help will try dism. but first will fullscreen a flash video to see if that is the cause. Back soon

 

[David Bailey]

I run sfc very often just to make sure things are ok. I will check about if there is a flash update and if that doesn't help will try dism. but first will fullscreen a flash video to see if that is the cause. Back soon

After running dism run sfc.

I always run sfc, dism, & sfc again.

 

[DestructoS]

So I updated flash and had no issues. Until I went out for a few hours and when i got back same thing so I am thinking it isn't flash related. a sfc scan and dism which came back normal has not helped. any more suggestions?

 

[David Bailey]

A refresh or restore to factory settings is all I can think of.