Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 Shell and every associated core feature and element are actually broken, and have been like this for many months.
I’ve been using windows 11 for six months. when I hover over the taskbar, a phantom windows explorer window appears, but it’s not clickable and it disappears when I move the mouse away. my right hand monitor has a white box with a small ‘no’ symbol in it stuck in the middle of the screen. it doesn’t seem to derive from any running application and I cannot get rid of it. on the windows 10 install I ran before, the task manager totally stopped working, it just froze every time I opened it. I run Linux on all my other machines and stuff does go wrong, but it goes wrong in ways that make sense to me and which I can fix. on windows people just tell you to run sfc scannow and reinstall if it doesn’t work. that’s no way to live your life.
I’ve been using windows 11 for six months. when I hover over the taskbar, a phantom windows explorer window appears, but it’s not clickable and it disappears when I move the mouse away. my right hand monitor has a white box with a small ‘no’ symbol in it stuck in the middle of the screen. it doesn’t seem to derive from any running application and I cannot get rid of it. on the windows 10 install I ran before, the task manager totally stopped working, it just froze every time I opened it. I run Linux on all my other machines and stuff does go wrong, but it goes wrong in ways that make sense to me and which I can fix. on windows people just tell you to run sfc scannow and reinstall if it doesn’t work. that’s no way to live your life.
I had a random no symbol on my external monitor that was being caused by its OSD detecting microphone mute and showing an icon.
This certainly isn’t a fix, but if you try to screenshot the icon and it shows up, you’ll know it’s being drawn by the computer and not the monitor.
Might give you a direction to investigate :)