Click a program on your Windows Taskbar and realize it’s missing? Sometimes the Taskbar will disappear, and you won’t see anything at the bottom of the screen, and other times, just the Start button is left, but everything else is gone.

So how do you get your Taskbar back? Well, there are a couple of ways you can restore the Taskbar, but it’s also worth knowing what can cause the Taskbar to disappear.

In my experience, there are four main reasons why your Taskbar might disappear:

1. Taskbar is set to automatically hide and not show
2. The explorer.exe process crashed and the Taskbar completely disappeared
3. Screen or home screen resolution changes and causes the Taskbar to turn off the screen

Let’s first go through each possible solution, starting with simple items.

Method 1 – Unhide the Taskbar

If your Taskbar is hidden, it will show up automatically when you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen. However, if something goes wrong and this doesn’t work anymore, you can turn off auto-hide
Step 1: Right-click on the Taskbar on the desktop and select Properties in the context menu.

Just in case, you should also check to make sure the Taskbar is located at the bottom of the screen. If it’s automatically hidden and is on the left or right side of the screen, you might not notice it.

Method 2 – Change display

If you regularly connect your computer to an external monitor or the dock, then your problem may be related to that problem. In Windows, press Windows + P or go to Control Panel, click Display and then click Adjust Resolution or Change Display Settings.

In Windows 7, you get a dialog box that pops up with a few options like Computer Only, Duplicate, Extend, etc. You want to make sure it’s set to Computer only.

In Windows 8 and Windows 10, you get pretty much the same options in the sidebar that pops out from the screen’s right side.

For Windows 10, you want to select the PC screen only from the list. Hopefully, if the Taskbar’s problem is related to the presentation screen, it has to fix it.

Method 3 – Restart Explorer.exe

This is probably a method that will fix the problem for most people. Explorer.exe is the process that controls desktop and Taskbar. You may also notice that sometimes, in addition to the Taskbar is missing. Your desktop icons are missing too!

Since they both run under explorer.exe, both disappear at the same time. To fix this problem, you need to open task manager in Windows.

Press Ctrl + alt + Delete to open Task Manager. When you open it, click File and then Run New Task or New Task (Run).

In the box, go ahead and type explorer.exe and press Enter. This will restart the explorer, and hopefully, you get your Taskbar back. Instead, if you see a new Windows Explorer pop-up, it means that the explorer.exe process is already running fine.

If none of these options work for you, some rarer issues could cause the Taskbar to disappear. Hopefully, one of them will work if nothing else.