Windows 11 taskbar won’t pop up anymore, even after stopping Dell TechHub

Hi all,

On my Dell laptop (Windows 11 Inspiron 16 plus) with an external Dell monitor, my taskbar has basically stopped working correctly and I’m trying to figure out what broke it.

What’s happening

• Taskbar is stuck behind full‑screen apps
• Auto‑hide edge won’t trigger at all
• I can’t reliably get the taskbar to appear.

TechHub used to be the trigger… but now it’s worse

At first, I could “fix” it by stopping the Dell TechHub Service—as soon as I stopped it, the taskbar went back to normal, and restarting TechHub would break it again.

Now, though, even if TechHub is stopped or restarted, the taskbar stays broken. So whatever changed seems to have left Windows in a bad state where the taskbar no longer recovers.

What I’ve already tried

• Restarted Explorer
• Switched main displays
• Toggled auto‑hide
• Updated graphics drivers
• Updated Dell utilities (including TechHub)

No luck so far.

Looking for ideas

Has anyone else seen this, or found a way to fully reset taskbar behavior on a Dell system? And if Dell support is reading, is there anything specific I can capture (logs, settings) that would help diagnose this?

Thanks in advance.