Section 2: Desktop, Taskbar, Start Menu

The Big Picture: Three Parts of One Shell

Explorer's shell is made of three parts you touch every day: the desktop (the big area with icons), the taskbar (the strip with buttons and the clock) and the Start menu (the launcher). They look like three different things. Under the surface they are all pieces of the shell, plus helper programs.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  DESKTOP  (wallpaper + icons)                      │
│   [Recycle Bin]  [My shortcut]  [A file]           │
│                                                    │
│            ┌──────────────┐                        │
│            │ START MENU   │                        │
│            │ pinned apps  │                        │
│            └──────────────┘                        │
├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ [Start] [Search] [App1] [App2]      ^ tray  Clock  │  TASKBAR
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

2.1 The Desktop as a Special Explorer Window

What it is: The desktop is a folder, shown as a big window of icons that sits behind all your other windows.

Two real folders on disk hold the icons you see:

Explorer merges both lists and draws them on the wallpaper. If you save a file "to the Desktop", it really goes into that folder. Open it in File Explorer and you will see the same files. (If you use OneDrive folder backup, your Desktop folder may live inside OneDrive instead. It still works the same way.)

Some icons are not files at all. This PC, Recycle Bin and Network are special shell items: virtual entries Explorer shows as if they were files.

A shortcut is a tiny file (extension .lnk) that only says "the real thing is over there". Deleting a shortcut does not delete the program.

Careful with the word "desktop". It has a second, deeper meaning inside the operating system:

A window station (here WinSta0) is a kernel object that holds desktops, plus the clipboard (Section 5). The sign-in screen and the secure Ctrl + Alt + Del screen use their own desktops, so a program on your normal desktop cannot read passwords typed on the secure one. You do not need these names day to day. It is enough to know the words exist, and that the details may differ between Windows versions.

Virtual desktops (Win + Tab, "New desktop") are a different, user-level feature. They group windows into several workspaces. The windows are the same kind of windows, just hidden or shown in groups.

2.2 The Taskbar and the Notification Area

What it is: The taskbar is the strip, usually at the bottom, that lists your running programs and offers quick tools. The shell draws it.

How does a taskbar button know a window exists? Whenever a program creates a normal top-level window, Windows tells the shell. The shell adds a button. When the window closes, the button goes. Section 3 explains what a "window" is in this sense.

Notification area icons. A program adds an icon there by asking the shell, using an API (Chapter 23). The program is still its own process. The icon is just a small "face" that it hands to Explorer to draw. Click it and Explorer sends the click back to the program, which decides what to do. That is why many background programs (antivirus, cloud sync, chat tools) show up there: they run all the time and want a small control panel.

What if Explorer restarts? Programs are told that "the taskbar was created again" and then re-add their icons. Most do. A few poorly written ones forget, and their icon stays missing until the app restarts.

Taskbar versus Task Manager. The taskbar lists windows. Task Manager lists processes (Chapter 11). A program can have several windows, or none (a service has no window at all).

2.3 The Start Menu (and Search)

What it is: The Start menu is the launcher: a list of apps and shortcuts, a place to find files and settings, and the power button.

Where do the app entries come from? Mostly from shortcut (.lnk) files stored in two Start Menu folders:

(%ProgramData% is normally C:\ProgramData, and %AppData% is C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming. A %name% is an environment variable: a short name that stands for a path.) When an installer puts a shortcut in one of these folders, that app appears in the "All apps" list. This ties in with Chapter 36 about installing software. Apps from the Microsoft Store are listed by a different mechanism, but they appear in the same list.

Windows 10 versus Windows 11:

Which processes run it? In recent Windows versions the Start menu and several related panels are hosted by helper programs such as StartMenuExperienceHost.exe and ShellExperienceHost.exe, and search uses its own host. The exact split of work differs between builds, so treat these names as a guide and not as a fixed rule. You can see them in Task Manager when you use Start. They are separate processes, so a problem in one can be fixed by ending it (it restarts) without touching the rest of the shell.

Search integration. When you press Win and start typing, Windows searches several places at once:

You type: "calc"
        │
        ▼
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│ Installed apps (shortcuts)  │──► Calculator
│ Settings pages              │──► (none)
│ Files (Windows Search index)│──► calc.xlsx
│ Web suggestions (if on)     │──► "calculator online"
└─────────────────────────────┘

Windows Search is a background service (Chapter 12, shown in Task Manager as SearchIndexer.exe) that builds an index: a small database of file names, and for some file types their contents, so that a search is instant instead of scanning the whole disk. A new file may take a short while to appear because the indexer has to notice and add it. You can choose which folders are indexed in Settings → Privacy & security → Searching Windows (the exact menu names change between versions).

Why does this matter? If Start or Search misbehaves (blank results, will not open), the cause is usually one of the helper hosts or the index, not "Windows is broken". Knowing the parts tells you where to look.

Summary