Pin to taskbar problem

Last week, the Windows Explorer disappeared, and I could not get it to pin back. I finally found some place that had a check list of items pinned to the taskbar. Explorer was still marked, I unmarked it, closed everything out, (said oh s**t, I'll never find that again), tried successfully to repin the icon. This morning the icon had been replaced with a white broken folder, the one with the two squiggly lines through it, and would not work. I clicked on "unpin", now I can't get it it pin back, and of course can not remember where I found that screen that worked.
I have been on so much pain medication the last month or so my memory has not been so good.

Hey wt.pm,

Are you referring to the Libraries link or to a Windows Explorer window that open up the contents of the hard drive?

Are you able to Right click the Start button, Open Windows Explorer, then right click the window that opens and "Pin this program to Taskbar"?

That should do it. If not, we got some trouble shooting to do

Mike that is the problem I was trying to describe, I don't guess I did that good of a job. Even though you did understand, kind of.

reg, it's the one that is actually yellow folders in a blue holder. Personally I think it looks like a deformed lego. Actually it opens up to the libraries folder. But, when you hover over it, all is says is "Windows Explorer". If I remember it is one of the default icons on the taskbar when you first install.

Unfortunately, I don't use the Libraries function at all.

But, if you right-click on the Computer icon on your desktop and locate the Libraries entry in the tree, drag it to the desktop and choose Create Shortcut Here.

I don't use the libraries either, however you can change this to open at any place you want. I have the icon on my desktop, but I want it pinned to the taskbar, like it was originally, but it keeps disappering, then I can't repin it until I unpin it even though it is not there. Here is a screenshot of me trying to pin it to the desktop, so you can see what it is doing.

Can you pin thje shortcut?

If you look at the picture I uploaded closely, you will notice on the bottom right corner of the transparent "icon" I am dragging, there is the "red circle with a slash through it", meaning illegal operation.
This is exactly what happened before, if I right click on the icon, the option to pin to taskbar is there, (same as before). However last time I managed to open the right settings folder, which said the shortcut was still pinned to taskbar, when I unpinned it here, I could actually re-pin it. That worked for about a week then it disappeared again. So I need to (1) find that option menu again, (2) figure out why it keeps doing this.
On XP I kept a link to the hard drive on the visible part of the quick launch area, because there are a lot of times when I am working, I need to open another explorer window, and being able to just click on a link instead of opening the start menu then clicking on the shortcut is really nice and a time (and movement) saver.


Edit;
While typing this I had an idea, and so I tried to pin a shortcut to the hard drive, but what happened is strange, it said "Pin to Explorer", and the icon disappeared. So apparently the link is still there, the icon display is just not working correctly.

Navigate to the C:\windows directory, locate explorer.exe and drag that to the to the taskbar.

Make sure to close all open windows and programs as it disappeared for me as well.

wt.pm

I'm still a little confused about your problem, but I hope this helps.

First off, I think this is the location you may be looking for. If you can't see it by navigating, be sure to check to "show hidden files and folders" in the Folders view options
C:\Users\{your user name}\appdata\roaming\microsoft\Internet Explorer\quick launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

Just some thoughts that may help:

Win 7 taskbar only allows for 1 Windows Explorer folder to be pinned to the taskbar. If you try to drag another folder onto the taskbar if you already have Explorer pinned, you will receive the red circle (like your image above)

You can; however, Pin frequent visited folders to the existing explorer folder that is pinned to the taskbar which is called jump lists. You can drag another folder to the windows explorer folder that is already pinned and it will add it as a jump location. In order for this to work you must have the following to options selected in the Start Menu properties:

Store and disply recently opened programs in the Start menu
Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar

If you want the pinned Windows Explorer icon to open up to My Computer instead of the Libraries, open the properties window for the Windows Explorer icon and type the following in the targt:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Good luck, let us know what happens