Taskbar icons gone missing

[Billythekidcal]

New user here to this forum, and I consider myself fairly computer savvy, but goddam, it took me about 10 minutes just to figure out how to post a comment to this site and try to help someone else with this issue. Thanks Microsoft!

Anyway, everything on my PC was running fine when I shut down my PC, then when I reopened it, a bunch of icon images in the task bar turned into what sort of looked like blank file explorer icons.

Restarting didn't help, so I googled the issue and a followed bunch of suggestions like auto-hiding and unhiding the taskbar, restarting Windows Explorer from the Task Manager, tweaking registry setttings etc. and none of the 10 different things I tried fixed the issue. Very frustrating!!!

Anyway, what did work was to right click on the offending programs' icons in the Start Menu, then opened the file location, and right-clicked the program launch file and re-pinned it to the taskbar. Then I deleted the corresponding program icon in the taskbar that wasn't working.

Hope that helps someone else, and thanks again Microsoft!   

[#2]

I wish this would work for me, but when I when I click on the programs in my start menu, File Location is not an option. Any other thoughts?

[#3]

I had that happen on a couple of the icons. I just searched the pc for those apps in the Program Files directory, found the application launchers, and created new shortcuts which I cut and pasted to my desktop and was then able to pin that link to the taskbar and then deleted the shortcut from my desktop, as well as the icon on the taskbar with the missing icon.

[#4]

For whatever reason I cannot find the application launchers for my Microsoft Mail app or the Settings app. These are two of the programs that will not show on my taskbar.