Hi James,

Normally in order to get out of this situation, you have to restart your computer and hope that whatever caused Windows to crash goes away. The icons can be missing from your desktop for two reasons: either something has gone wrong with the explorer.exe process, which handles the desktop, or the icons are simply hidden.

Usually it’s an explorer.exe problem if the entire taskbar disappears also. In this article, I’ll mention a couple of ways you can fix either of these issues.
Note: If you are simply trying to get the Computer, Control Panel, Recycle Bin, Network or User’s Files icons back, then you just need to right-click on the desktop, click Personalize, click Change desktop icons on the left hand menu and then check the icons you want on the desktop.


Show Desktop icons
The latter method is easier to fix. In Windows XP, right-click on the desktop and choose Arrange Icons By. Next check the Show Desktop Icons item.

In Windows 7 and higher, you right-click on the desktop and choose View and then make sure Show desktop icons is checked.

Pretty simple! But as mentioned earlier, that’s normally not the reason why your desktop icons are missing. The second method involves restarting the explorer process without having to restart Windows.

Restart Explorer.exe
Press CTRL + ALT + DEL and click on Task Manager. In Windows 7 and higher, you click on the Start task manager link at the bottom.


Now in the Task Manager, you want to click on File and then New Task (Run). Make sure you are on the Processes tab.

In the Open box, go ahead and type in explorer.exe and click OK.

That’s it! This will cause the Explorer process to be restarted and hopefully you will get your desktop icons, taskbar, and Start button back! Note that if the explorer.exe process is already running, then running this task will just open a new Explorer window on your desktop.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Lokesh