Running Windows 7 Home 64bit OS. After running Windows Updates, I have run into a problem where the icons on the taskbar disappear from view. THe problem is reproducible, and can be temporarily fixed using two methods:
1) Boot into Windows 7
2) All pinned icons are missing from the Taskbar. The Windows button, and system tray icons are still visible
3a) I drag an icon to the taskbar, the icon is successfully pinned. At the same time, the taskbar refreshes, and all of the pinned icons are now visible.
3b) I go into Task Manager, kill explorer.exe, and run explorer.exe. The taskbar re-appears with all of the pinned icons visible.
I ran a chkdsk -> no problems found
I deleted the icon cache.db file -> no difference
I verified the icons were located in the quicklaunch folder
I analyzed the Windows Update History and saw 20 updates were installed. None appeared to have any effect on the UI, other than the monthly roll ups (July 2016 rollup, August 2016 rollup, December 2016 rollup, and March 2017 rollup)
I'm not quite sure what my next troubleshooting step should be
Open cmd.exe with Run as Administrator and run SFC /SCANNOW.
Allow to complete, restart or, preferably, shut down the computer and then start up again.
Test to see if the problem has been corrected.