Taskbar Randomly Becomes Unclickable (found one workaround)

[Drew Wilson]

I'm not sure why the heck this happened for sure, but I installed Yahoo! Messenger. After a few days, the entire taskbar became unclickable on my Vista laptop. Basically, you click on anything in the task bar (minus the start menu) and all you get is a 'ding' noise. Right click, left click or anything and it's just that 'ding' noise. The odd part is if you start a new task, the task bar will update as usual, but you can't click on anything.

I searched around for a few hours on Google but it was mainly people asking similar questions with no response. After some extensive research, one person linked to a support page where it's suppose to fix a problem when the entire desktop freezes. It's something that wasn't an issue I was having I figured.

So, there was a suggestion somewhere where you go into task manager, go to the processes and kill the explorer.exe process. Then, you start a new task in t6he Applications tab and type in explorer.exe to bring back the task bar. This seems to solve the problem, but I'm not sure if the problem will return as I have yet to restart the computer or anything. Anyway, thought I'd post this up for thoughts on the issue and any possible solutions or reasons why the heck Vista is behaving this way. I'm quite sure it's linked to Yahoo Messenger because I never had this problem until that program was installed.

It took me about a day and a half to find this workaround, so I also thought I'd post this up to save a few others from a similar headache.

[DigitalJunkie]

Perhaps Yahoo Toolbar is not compatible with Vista???

[Drew Wilson]

That's what both of us here are thinking. It really sounds like Yahoo is just incompatible. Right now, Yahoo has been shut down as well, so it is really looking like Yahoo toolbar is causing this.

[napho]

Shell crashes are nothing new to users of Windows 98 and XP, and to a lesser extent Vista. Through the years it's gotten to the point where some figured that Windows wasn't compatible with Windows.

[w31n3r]

Through the years it's gotten to the point where some figured that Windows wasn't compatible with Windows.

ha! i knew i wasn't the only one.

i've had explorer problems for years, and the solution drew gave has become a second nature for me. haven't yet come across this on vista yet. i have vista business on my laptop and yahoo messenger too, no such problems so far. but good to be forewarned :icon_thum