Windows 7: Where did my desktop icons and task bar go to?

Solved. See #18 below.

When I leave my pc for perhaps 30 minutes or longer, upon my return after waking up my monitor the desktop shows only the wallpaper. My desktop icons are gone and my start button along with the taskbar is gone. I have not discovered how to get them back.

On some occasions even the wallpaper has shrunk in size.

Hello oldtraveler,

How long has this been going on?

I have had the pc for only five days. I've noticed it from the beginning.

Re-booting solves the problem, but a cold boot is required.

You bought it new, I take it?

Go into Device Manager, and right-click on your monitor and display adapter and choose Update Drivers.

See if that works.

Hope it helps,
~Jonathan

New out of the box 5 days ago.

Device Manager says all drivers for monitor and display adapter are up to date.

Can you find your monitor and graphics card manufacturers' sites, and download the latest drivers from them? Sometimes the Windows driver finder doesn't do a good job of locating the latest drivers.

Forgot to mention, to find your graphics card, try using Speccy.

If you run your monitor at lower resolution, does the error still occur? If you goog around a bit, there are a few folks having trouble with Windows 7 and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 display adapter, so good chance it is a driver issue.

instead of rebooting, press Ctrl+Alt+Del and choose Task Manager. under the applications tab, click on 'New Task...'. type in explorer.exe and press enter. does the taskbar come back up?

Intel can't locate my G45/G43 Express Chipset (display adapter driver)

My Acer monitor just says Generic PNP monitor.

The problem hasn't occured in the last 24 hours. Should it happen again, I'll try the Ctrl-Alt-Delete solution.

It just now happened again. I get to a desktop with wallpaper, but no icons or Windows taskbar. I am able to right click on the desktop and get the usual menu. I don't see anything to force the taskbar to re-appear.