Taskbar Disappears Over Remote Desktop Connection When Outside Local Network

I had the same issue.

The explorer.exe task crashed and the result was the situation described in the question above.

To solve this from RDP I used ctrl + alt + end (twice) then I selected the Task Manager option from the menu and from there I restarted the explorer.exe process by selecting File -> Run new task (I entered "explorer.exe" in the open text box).


Searching the problem, I saw other people with this problem, though on different versions of Windows, but the solution was in same.

  1. Open Task Manager
  2. Kill the explorer.exe process
  3. Restart explorer.exe from the File -> Run menu option in Task Manager

Source

Or....

  1. Press Ctrl + Alt + End
  2. Press Log off
  3. Then start a new RDP session and re-log in