Windows 8 Frequent Taskbar Icon Distortion and Start Menu Malfunctions on Windows

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Kalificus

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May 4, 2014
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Every few hours I have an extremely annoying bug...

The icons on the taskbar at the bottom of my screen become distorted. They'll generate copies of themselves, overlap other icons, and the start menu button disappears. Whenever I try to click an icon, it opens the icon to its left, as if the mouse needs to be calibrated. When I open the start menu, every time I scroll my mouse across a shortcut, it disappears. Poof. Just like that. I scroll my mouse over the icons a few more times, and usually, they'll come back, but if I scroll again, they disappear once more. Thus, I'm not able to open any programs from the start menu. Additionally, my background (which I normally have cycling through a folder of wallpapers) goes completely black.


This happens without warning; sometimes I'm playing video games and it happens when I alt-tab, sometimes I'm browsing the internet and it happens randomly, once I was just looking at my screen without running any programs or tasks and it happened. It will fix itself anywhere from a span of 2 minutes to half an hour.
 
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Solution
Hi Kalificus,

Start Menu button can be manually started from this location- C:\Program Files\Classic Shell\ClassicStartMenu.exe. Does starting it from there put the button back on the taskbar and do you see it running in the Task Manager? If yes, then it's just not starting at startup reliably. Put a shortcut to that EXE in the startup folder. Check in Services.msc if the Classic Shell service is disabled. It should be set to Automatic and started. The service starts the Start Menu on Windows 8.
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Hi

I have no idea what would cause this, but I'd start by running SFC /scannow from the administrator command prompt.
See if it finds any bad system files.

If you have a restore point that was created before this started happening you could try going back to that.

Mike
 
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This is a problem thats happened since I switched to windows 8. I doubt restoring previous versions would cure the problem.
 
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Then try the SFC /scannow thing and let us know what happens.

I understand that this happened from the time you installed Windows 8?

Are you running any software like Classic Shell, or Start 8 to aid in using the desktop?

You might check to see if your video drivers are up to date, not sure this could be related but I suppose it might just be a graphical problem.

It's very weird that it only happens ever few hours, and you mention games, could it be a heat issue?

You could check with a monitor program like this...

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

It's what I use to keep tabs on my computers performance.

Mike
 
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Hi Kalificus,

Start Menu button can be manually started from this location- C:\Program Files\Classic Shell\ClassicStartMenu.exe. Does starting it from there put the button back on the taskbar and do you see it running in the Task Manager? If yes, then it's just not starting at startup reliably. Put a shortcut to that EXE in the startup folder. Check in Services.msc if the Classic Shell service is disabled. It should be set to Automatic and started. The service starts the Start Menu on Windows 8.
 
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