Win10 Application icons in the taskbar sometimes appear blank after the system resumes from sleep

You’re seeing taskbar icons turn into blank rectangles after sleep, while hovering or clicking brings them back. That behavior points more to Explorer’s icon rendering/cache or the graphics session returning from sleep than to damaged shortcuts. First install pending Windows updates and the PC maker’s graphics, chipset, and display-driver updates; high-DPI resume issues often sit at that boundary. When it happens, open Task Manager, select Windows Explorer, and choose Restart, then test a second sleep/resume cycle. Check whether the issue occurs with one monitor and a standard scaling value; if it stops, record the monitor, dock, scaling, and driver versions before restoring the high-DPI setup. Run DISM and then SFC from an elevated terminal before attempting registry or cache-deletion tweaks. If it continues after a clean driver update, capture a Reliability Monitor entry and report the Windows build, GPU driver, display arrangement, and reproducible sleep sequence through Feedback Hub.