Troubleshooting Tips: How to Fix the Action Center Not Opening Issue on Windows 10 and 11

The Action Center in Windows 10 and 11 delivers various notifications from both system and user apps. Plus, it offers quick buttons for enabling or disabling many Windows features like Wi-Fi, mobile hotspot, Bluetooth, and more. At times, its icon disappears from the tray, making it impossible to access the Action Center on Windows. This guide illustrates how to reinstall the Action Center when it won’t open.

Firstly, attempt to launch the Action Center with the Win+A command. If the Action Center panel pops up, you likely only need to activate the Action Center tray icon via Settings.

Press Win+I and navigate to Personalization -> Taskbar. To quickly access these settings, use the URI command: ms-settings:taskbar.

Scroll down and check that the Action Center option is enabled in Turn system icons on or off section.

Then go to the notification settings (Settings -> System -> Notification and Actions: ms-settings:notifications ).

Here you can enable or disable the Action Center and select apps that are allowed to show notifications through the Action Center.

Try restarting the File Explorer process if the Action Center is enabled in Settings but you cannot open it. Kill the exporer.exe process using the Task Manager.

Or restart the process using PowerShell:

taskkill /f /FI "USERNAME eq $env:UserName"/im explorer.exe
 
c:windowsexplorer.exe

Try to start the elevated File Explorer process as an administrator.

If this doesn’t help, check whether you have a local policy that disables Action Center in Windows.

  1. Open the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc).
  2. Go to User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start Menu and Taskbar;
  3. Check that the Remove Notifications and Action Center option is disabled or not configured.

If your computer is added to an Active Directory domain, the domain GPOs may disable Action Center on your computer. Use rsop.msc or gpresult command to get the resulting GPO settings on the computer and check that Action Center is not disabled by domain GPOs.

The Action Center can also be deactivated via the registry. The DisableNotificationCenter value in the following registry keys is the one to check:

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsExplorer
  • HKLMSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftWindowsExplorer

If the value of the DisableNotificationCenter parameter is 1, the Action Center is disabled. However, it can be enabled again using the command:

REG ADD HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsExplorer /v DisableNotificationCenter /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

In some instances, the inconsistencies with the Action Center might be due to mistakes in the Windows Store or the Settings app. Read this article to learn how you can correct the Settings app in case it refuses to open. You can attempt to re-register all the MS Store apps by utilizing manifest files via the PowerShell one-liner:

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)AppXManifest.xml"}

This could also be solved by resetting the user environment configurations in the UsrClass.dat file. You can simply rename this file in the %localappdata%MicrosoftWindows folder and then log back into your Windows to recreate the file or use PowerShell:

Rename-Item "$env:localappdataMicrosoftWindowsUsrClass.dat” oldUsrClass.dat –Force

If nothing helps, use the DISM and SFC commands to check the Windows image health:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
sfc /scannow

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