Start Menu and Quick Launch Bar Has Disappeared

[Guest]

This is driving me nuts. Running XP Pro with SP2 and all updates. My start
menu does two things, firstly the 'All Programs' button suddenly starts doing
nothing, I can only right click and explore, it wont open in the start menu,
secondly, the left hand side of the menu will go black, i.e. nothing visible,
and the quick launch toolbar is gone. I have to shutdown and then reboot and
things seem to be ok. But the quick launch toolbar is missing from the
taskbar. I have to go back and add a check mark back to the show quick launch
in the taskbar and start menu properties. There seems to be nothing
particular connected with this issue and everything else seems to be ok.

The computer is completely clean of ad/malware and virus infection, and this
happens randomly, sometimes going for days before occurring.

I did a system file scannow (sfc) no corrupted or changed windows files found.

Thanks very much for your help.

 

[Graham Simpson]

Did you have any joy tracking down the cause of this?
I have been experiencing exactly the same problem. I've been going through
an exhaustive series of removing things to get to the bottom of it. My best
guess at the moment is it happens when I add or remove (not sure which yet)
a USB removable hard drive. Do you have anything similar?

 

[Guest]

Graham, I never got a response from my post, so I did another post in the XP
New User. What seems to have worked for me, ( so far ) was a replay from “The
Unknown P†Check it out at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...sers&mid=ca21923b-c066-4c56-be64-1a906b00338c

“Do a complete cleanup\defrag and then error check your system. After
running the disk cleanup and then the defrag go>start>run and type in chkdsk
/r and click ok. You will have to accept the on screen prompt to run it at
the next boot. Then reboot. The check may take quite some time to run all
five checks and recover\repair any bad sectors. This should then become a
regular part of your system maintenance. I also highly recommend CCleaner
for keeping the garbage off your system. I don't use the "clean prefetch"
option though as cleaning out the prefetch to improve performance is a myth.
TTFN. “

There are two other replay that may work, but I didn’t try them. Hope this
helps. Good luck.

Doyle

 

[Graham Simpson]

Thanks
I'll keep monitoring but since I've stopped using the USB removable drive
I've had no further troubles.
Graham