Taskbar Issues

An odd one here. Every now & then, my Win 11 task bar becomes unresponsive until I minimize any open programmes, at which point it behave normally again. It doesn't do it all the time, and so far, I've not noticed any pattern in the behaviour. It seems to be completely random (though I doubt that it actually is) and can occur when using Edge, playing a media file, using Explorer, or any one of a number of other programmes. Once it's unresponsive, all other windows have to be minimized (or closed) in order for it to come back to life, at which point it behaves normally for a while.

I've installed all available updates, all drivers are up to date, and a recent firmware update also made no change in the behaviour.

Laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad running Win 11 ver 23H2 Build 22631.4541 13th Gen Core i7 13620H Mhz, 16 GB RAM

Any thoughts?

Cliff

If any installed, uninstall any 3rd party app that alters the GUI and restart.

Make sure you have no corrupt system files that is causing this problem. Open a command prompt as administrator and type sfc /scannow
Pay attention to the scan results to see if SFC found anything it could not repair. If it found corruption it could not fix followup with this command (note the spaces)
dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
Restart computer

Perform a clean boot to eliminate software conflict causing the issue. If it doesn't happen in a clean boot, you have some software conflicting with Windows. Brink's procedure will help you weed out which one. Perform a Clean Boot in Windows 11 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts Tutorial
This might prove difficult to prove if the issue doesn't happen very often.

Thanks for the very quick response. Just ran sfc /scannow and it reported that corrupted files were found and repaired. Hopefully that will be the fix, but as it's random issue, it will be a while before I know for sure. Fingers crossed!!

Thanks again for the help, I'll report back in a day or so (or sooner if it plays up!)

Cheers,

Cliff

Just to bring this up to date: Sadly, running the sfc/scannow command did not fix things as the issue returned after a day or so. Taking inspiration from the post above, I had a look at Task Manager to see what background service & apps were running and tried closing them down one by one. As soon as I closed the "Lenovo Vantage" app that came pre-installed, the task bar came back to life and has been operating without issue for a few days now. I's an intermittent problem, but would normally occur at least once each day, so I'm hoping I've finally found the culprit. Fingers crossed!!

Cliff

Whatever method you used to solve it, that's what matters and good for you. Had you put the machine in a clean boot state as was suggested, you would have known it was conflicting software immediately.

glasskuter said:

Whatever method you used to solve it, that's what matters and good for you. Had you put the machine in a clean boot state as was suggested, you would have known it was conflicting software immediately.

Click to expand...

You're right, of course. That was going to be my next step, but I was sitting watching Netflix (as you do) and in a moment of boredom just opened up Task Manager to see what was running. I honestly didn't expect for one minute to have any success just stopping random programmes and was more than a little surprised to see the Task Bar pop back to life as soon as the Lenovo programme was stopped. All very un-scientific, and not an approach I would recommend - it seems I just got lucky!

Cliff