Windows 7 Taskbar and Start Menu Problems

[LodeRunner]

I have a Dell Latitude E5500 that was upgraded from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional. This upgrade took place approximately 3 weeks ago. Everything worked properly up until today.

Upon logging in, my desktop background image was gone, replaced by just a black background. Skype wouldn't autologin, it somehow forgot the password. All items pinned to the Taskbar or Start Menu reported the item was not found or moved and offered to remove the offending shortcut. All passwords in Outlook were missing.

Desktop shortcuts worked fine; hard drive tests reported no errors. Applications could be launched either by browsing to the executable or punching the name into the "Run" dialog box. Standard start menu shortcuts (non-pinned items) launch properly.

Do I need to just rebuild the entire user profile, or is this possibly an ACL problem? Might a System Restore fix this?

[Devasis]

May be this solution will work for for you. Whenever your desktop comes with no icons on it or when your explorer does not work. Go to the task manager by pressing CTRL+ALT+DELT. Make a new task in the task manager and name it "explorer.exe" and press ok. By doing this probably your problem would be sorted out.

[LodeRunner]

Thanks for the reply. Interestingly, it wasn't the glitch that people have been reporting after the most recent update, which was my initial suspicion. The Explorer process was working fine.

Problem was solved (about 3 minutes ago now) by pulling a known good copy of the roaming profile from a backup, purging the profile and account data on the laptop, then logging back in and letting it copy down from the server.

I encountered the dreaded "Group Policy Client Service Failed the Logon" error. Solved this by going to the Advanced user profile management, copying the Default profile over the roaming profile stored on the server, then logging in. Once the fresh profile was saved, I logged out, copied the old profile from backup to the server, logged in and the only thing missing was my desktop background, since that's a locally stored preference.

[Ayush]

The problem appears to be the ‘Start Menu window’ been moved to another location, mysteriously and for unknown reason. The cause of the problem is because users have made the shortcut in Windows 7 to be ‘not a shortcut’ by removing the shortcut arrow on icons (including desktop icons) by removing IsShortcut registry key. In order to fix and restore Start Menu to its original default and “by right” position, unlock the Taskbar (by unticking Lock the taskbar option when right clicking on empty space of Taskbar), and then move the Taskbar to another position on desktop (can be to the left, right or top position), before drag it back to original bottom of the screen position. Once Windows Taskbar is back to position, Start Menu will be recovered and reverted to its default location, i.e. above the Taskbar.