I am using SW2011 SP3.

My task pane has gone blank and I can't seem to bring it back to life so I am looking for suggestions...

Background:

I run with dual monitors, SW on the LH monitor and the task pane on the right. All has been well with this for a long time.

Last week I was reviewing a spreadsheet from our ERP system against the PDM Workgroup vault view in my task pane. To make viewing easier, I unpinned the task pane and moved it onto the LH screen over the SW drawing area so as to give more screen space to Excel on the other monitor. Worked well.

I shut down my workstation for the weekend.

Booting up today brought with it some updates for the PC (possible culprits?). SolidWorks boots up fine and the task pane is where I left it last week - over the top of the SW drawing area. The task pane tabs are present and their icons displayed properly. But the entire viewing area of the task pane is blank and colored the windows desktop background color. There are no graphics of any sort (text, windows, borders, title bar). If I click on the various tabs, I get the hour glass for a bit - so it seems SW is calculating the necessary data for display. The task pane will also auto collapse when a model is opened. This "blankness" does not have the same behaviors as low resources or driver flakiness.

I have tried:

Rebooting (several times)

Renaming the task pane registry entry so SW will create a default one.

Changed the View / Workspace settings in SW between Default, Widescreen, Dual Monitor

Tried SW with a file loaded and nothing loaded.

Tried clicking right where the push pin should be but still cannot move.

All other SW graphics seem stable and usual.

Have not upgraded SW

Have not upgraded video driver. (yes, running the latest recommended driver and have been for a long time)

Any suggestions on getting this thing to find itself are appreciated.

Thanks, Daen