Taskbar icons not showing after reset and cache clear (tried all fixes)

Hi everyone,

I’m having an issue where some of my Microsoft taskbar icons are not displaying (they appear blank), even though the apps themselves open normally. Other apps like Adobe and Canva appear not to be affected by this issue.

This started after I reset my laptop. Before noticing the issue, I also deleted a large amount of cache files to free up space, which I suspect may have triggered the problem.

Since then, I’ve worked through a lot of troubleshooting (with Copilot), including:

• Deleting and rebuilding the icon cache multiple times
• Restarting Windows Explorer
• Running ie4uinit.exe commands (ClearIconCache and show)
• Unpinning and re-pinning all taskbar apps
• Restarting multiple times

Despite this, the issue is unchanged. Icons are still not showing, even for system apps like Copilot (see screenshot):

 I don’t have admin access (school-managed device), so I’m limited in what I can try. Has anyone seen this before or know what might be causing it? Could this be a corrupted user profile or a policy issue?

 Thanks in advance.