Introduction

I’ve had an ongoing issue recently on multiple Windows 11 computers where seemingly random icons pinned to the taskbar no longer show properly and instead are blank. This is pretty annoying so I tweeted about it on Twitter, and a lot of people replied that they too had seen the same thing with no clear reason why.

Here’s what my taskbar looked like with the problem.

And I’ve seen this on different versions of Windows 11 (22H2, 23H2) there seemed to be no pattern.

Possible solution?

One of the replies to my tweet caught my attention though, and I gave it a try, to my surprise it solved the problem for me, I’ll update this blog post later if it returns but for now, all is good.

Note: Prior to this I’ve tried restarting Explorer  and restarting the computer before this to no avail, the icons stayed white.

Andrew Blackburn asked if I had any EXE (executable) files on my desktop (I did, CMTrace.exe and some other installer file) and if I was using OneDrive known folder move (I was).

so  as per my reply above, I removed the EXE files from my desktop (simply moved them somewhere else in OneDrive) and restarted Windows Explorer, after that, the problem ‘fixed’ itself.

Note: The missing icons (blank icons) are not tied to the EXE files on my desktop, for example in my screenshot the first blank icon was for Google Chrome. The EXE files I had on my desktop were CMTrace.exe (log reading tool from Configuration Manager) and a folder containing all the Sysinternal/Microsoft PSTools exe files.

Here’s how my taskbar looks now.

well that’s it for this quick blog, thanks to Andrew and to all the others that replied ! I hope this helps someone

cheers

niall