I usually shut down my desktop each evening and boot it in the morning. When the machine boots I usually let it settle down for about 20 minutes before I sign in. On the morning of 2023-03-17 the sign-in seemed to work normally with the desktop being painted and a my usual auto-start things running. However the taskbar would paint and then disappear about once a second. I tried to start a command prompt using the desktop shortcut. While I could select the icon cmd.exe did not seem to be starting. After ten minutes the task bar painted and the system seemed normal and usable. In reviewing the event log I saw that Explorer.exe was crashing due to issues within Taskbar.View.dll and had been getting restarted. I also saw that the same thing happened the day before on 2023-03-16 though on that day Explorer.exe crashed and was restarted for three minutes before Explorer.exe was able to get running normally. Windows' Update Tuesday was this week meaning there's new code here and there on Microsoft's side.
For the last two days the machine has started up normally with explorer.exe not crashing.
Is there anything I could look at that would help me figure out if the crashes were triggered by Windhawk? Windhawk is at v1.1 beta. Within Windhawk I'm running "Disable grouping on the taskbar" and "Taskbar labels for Windows 11" both of which were and are up to date.
Is there a way to temporarily disable Windhawk from a command prompt? I should be able to get a copy of cmd.exe running even if Explorer.exe won't start. If the explorer.exe crashing loop happens again I'd want to try disabling Windhawk to see if that allows explorer.exe to start.
I usually shut down my desktop each evening and boot it in the morning. When the machine boots I usually let it settle down for about 20 minutes before I sign in. On the morning of 2023-03-17 the sign-in seemed to work normally with the desktop being painted and a my usual auto-start things running. However the taskbar would paint and then disappear about once a second. I tried to start a command prompt using the desktop shortcut. While I could select the icon cmd.exe did not seem to be starting. After ten minutes the task bar painted and the system seemed normal and usable. In reviewing the event log I saw that Explorer.exe was crashing due to issues within Taskbar.View.dll and had been getting restarted. I also saw that the same thing happened the day before on 2023-03-16 though on that day Explorer.exe crashed and was restarted for three minutes before Explorer.exe was able to get running normally. Windows' Update Tuesday was this week meaning there's new code here and there on Microsoft's side.
For the last two days the machine has started up normally with explorer.exe not crashing.
Is there anything I could look at that would help me figure out if the crashes were triggered by Windhawk? Windhawk is at v1.1 beta. Within Windhawk I'm running "Disable grouping on the taskbar" and "Taskbar labels for Windows 11" both of which were and are up to date.
Is there a way to temporarily disable Windhawk from a command prompt? I should be able to get a copy of cmd.exe running even if Explorer.exe won't start. If the explorer.exe crashing loop happens again I'd want to try disabling Windhawk to see if that allows explorer.exe to start.