Hi all,
I have a user who told me that the taskbar had randomly vanished on their windows 11 PC, this user is located geographically far so the only way I could troubleshoot is via remote desktop.
I tried all the usual stuff; restart, restart explorer from task manager, run DSIM, run sfc, ect.
None of these showed any signs of working. These issue complicates by the fact that I cant open Windows Settings to perform updates (or do anything), when entering ms-settings from Win+R I get the error that windows cannot find "ms-settings". I have scoured far and wide on Microsoft official forums, MVP forums, and really just anywhere that seems like it could have a fix, I've tried almost everything presented to me with no luck. I've even tried using system restore to bring the PC to a state well before the user reported the issue, but It's not fixed. I understand that re-installing windows would probably be the next logical step, however this user is not very technical so walking them through the process would be difficult, and again its almost impossible to get to them as they live very far away. Although possible over the phone, any help or solutions that can be done with RD would be greatly appreciated.
Additional context:
The taskbar does not appear at all - not even the shape, just nothing.
When hovering the mouse over where the taskbar should be, a loading ring appears.
When the user boots the PC in safe mode, the taskbar appears as it should.
When trying to view installed updates via control panel, the page gets stuck - most likely due to settings not working but still strange.