No taskbar and screen flickering to black on build 22581

Hi Ethanmaul and anyone else experiencing this issue.

I had experienced this issue myself too, even tried installing later builds through 'Windows + i' to open settings. However I found myself going deeper down the rabbit hole making my pc even more useless.

Either way; I have found a way to restore the taskbar and mitigate the screen flickering. I think this new build is simply unstable if installed in a certain way - I have no idea. If anyone has a more correct solution please let me and others know. In the meantime, here is my roundabout but working solution.

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First, we want to access Advanced Boot Options. You can do this is a couple ways if you look online; I found the easiest way is to Boot the PC, dismiss the time screen and then before logging in, clicking the power options button in the bottom right. Hold shift, and select restart. This will boot the system into Advanced Boot Options screen.

From here, you can perform any diagnostics you want, including accessing safe mode if you want to fiddle with the windows install. What I did was 'troubleshoot', and then 'Reset your PC'. This will reinstall the current build as safely as possible. You can choose whether you want to keep the files or not, however applications will be removed in order to install safely.

Follow the instructions with your desired preferences. The reset took my generally speedy PC about 5-10 minutes so be prepared to wait upwards of that. Once you're back in, you should find your taskbar returned and screen flickering gone.

Reset all your preferences in your settings and then take a a few tens of minutes to get the PC back to it's desired state. Remember to reinstall any applications too. If you find that even Microsoft apps aren't working (Edge just didn't exist for some reason?), use the Microsoft Store application. 

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Apologies it's a very roundabout way, but at least this way you will get the current build back to a stable and USABLE point.

Let me know if there are any issues and I'll try my best to respond 👍