Windows 10 Taskbar Broken

[oskarha]

I have been running windows 10 technical preview on my Dell laptop just fine for quite a while now, but when this morning many things went wrong.

 

I was restarting by pc as i was having some problems with the start menu not displaying by pinned tiles correctly.

I restarted my pc and the start menu refused to open and the taskbar was dead (see-attached screen shot). The notifications area was also dead; with only the clock popping up if, I pressed an icon that was not there.

Because of this, I have not been able to use explorer.exe, so I have been stuck to using CMD and 7-zip for file management, and multitasking without a taskbar has been a horrible mess.

 

I installed a copy of windows 10 on a virtual machine, and the same problem occurred...?

I have tried replacing explorer.exe with the explorer.exe from that VM, but with no luck, I reverted to the original one.

I have tried using this guide:

https://www.techmesto.com/fix-start-menu-broken-windows-10-technical-preview/

However, it did not provide any solution that worked for me.

 

I have also noticed that explorer.exe is hogging about 50% of my CPU.

 

General specs of the laptop:

Dell Vostro 1510

Intel Core 2 Duo T5670

4GB DDR2 RAM

320 WD Scorpio black HDD

Integrated Intel GMA X3100

 

Any help would be highly appreciated, as this laptop is my main workhorse at school.

[flibberdipper]

Stupid question: Have you applied any custom themepacks or anything like that? And does it work when you boot into safe mode?

[TDP_Equinox]

Stupid question: Do you honestly expect support on a platform that is in pre release that is months away from being done?
Running tech preview as a daily driver is the stupidest thing one can do; It may be stable now but its a work in progress and it will frequently jump between stable and unstable.

 

Mark topic as solved and re install windows.

[oskarha]

Yes, i am using a theme in the screenshot and i have tried with the stock theme and in safe mode as well, without any luck. I know that the technical preview is going to be unstable, but I like taking risks. I have been running just fine without explorer.exe for two days now, without any problems. Ive found a backup that I'll try stealing a few system files to get explorer.exe up and running again.