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ViGlance vs StartAllBack vs ExplorerPatcher

Three ways to put the Windows 7 taskbar back on Windows 11. One of them is mine.

Posted 19 August 2026 · claims checked the same day

Windows 11 took the taskbar apart. No grouping you can control, no hover previews worth the name, no moving it to the top, and a start orb glued to the middle. Three tools get most of it back, and they work in fundamentally different ways — which matters more than any feature list, because it decides what happens to your PC when Microsoft ships the next update.

The difference that actually matters: does it patch Explorer?

StartAllBack and ExplorerPatcher both work by getting inside explorer.exe and changing the taskbar Windows already draws. That is why they can be so faithful — they are not imitating the old taskbar, they are switching the real one back on. It is also why they carry a set of problems that have nothing to do with how good they are:

• Microsoft lists both as incompatible with Windows 11 and recommends against them.
• Feature updates have blocked installation while they are present — 24H2 did exactly that — so you uninstall, update, reinstall.
• Microsoft Defender flags ExplorerPatcher, so you end up adding a folder exclusion to install a taskbar tweak.
• They fight each other. Run StartAllBack and ExplorerPatcher together and the taskbar reverts to the Windows 11 one.
• When Explorer crashes, your whole shell goes with it.

ViGlance doesn't do any of that. It is an ordinary application that draws its own bar in its own window and tucks the real taskbar out of the way. Nothing is injected into Explorer, nothing is patched, Defender has no opinion about it, and Windows updates don't care that it is there. If it crashes, you have lost a taskbar replacement, not a desktop.

That is the trade, stated plainly: they get closer to the real thing, and I stay out of the way of your operating system.

When to buy StartAllBack

If what you want is Windows 7 back, exactly — taskbar, start menu, Explorer, the ribbon gone, the lot — StartAllBack is the best in the business and $4.99 one-off is a bargain. It is polished, it is actively maintained, it feels native because it largely is native, and it does the whole shell rather than one piece of it. There is a free trial, so you will know inside ten minutes.

Buy it, and accept the maintenance: you will occasionally uninstall it to take a Windows feature update and put it back afterwards. For most people who want the Windows 7 look that is a fair swap, and I would rather tell you that than pretend the free option wins on fidelity, because it doesn't.

When ExplorerPatcher is the right answer

ExplorerPatcher is free, open source, and goes deeper than anything else here — taskbar, start menu, Explorer, the alt-tab switcher, the context menus, most of it configurable to a level the others don't attempt. If you are the sort of person who enjoys a settings dialogue with two hundred options in it, this is the one you want, and it costs nothing.

It asks more of you in return. The Defender flag means an exclusion. The upgrade blocks mean you will hit one eventually. And it is doing genuinely deep surgery on the shell, which is a thing to know rather than a thing to be scared of — but know it.

When ViGlance is the right answer

ViGlance is for when you want the Windows 7 taskbar and you want your PC left alone. It's a single application under a megabyte, it does not touch Explorer, and it uninstalls like anything else. If you have ever uninstalled a shell tool and been left staring at a blank desktop, that is the failure mode this design avoids by construction.

It also goes places the other two can't. StartAllBack and ExplorerPatcher are Windows 10 and 11 tools — that is the whole point of them. ViGlance runs on XP, Vista, 7 and 8 as well, off the same installer. If you are keeping an old machine alive, or you want the same taskbar across a mixed set of PCs, it is the only one of the three that can do it.

And it is skinnable properly, which is the thing this whole corner of software used to be about. The current release brought real Windows 11 acrylic blur to the default skin, one band per window with proper tile icons for Store apps, and a start orb that finally sits flush in the bar. Pair it with ViStart and the orb opens ViStart's menu directly — the two of them now talk to each other over an internal bridge rather than faking keystrokes at one another.

Honestly?

If you are on Windows 11, you want it to look and feel exactly like Windows 7, and $4.99 is nothing to you — buy StartAllBack. It is better at that specific job than my free one is, and I would rather you spend a fiver and be happy than install mine and be disappointed.

Take ViGlance if you want the taskbar without a tool that patches your shell, if you are on Windows versions the other two abandoned, if you want to skin it, or if you just want to try something that costs nothing and uninstalls cleanly. It has been going since 2009, it is open source, and there is no paid version waiting behind it.

Free, no sign-up, no bundled extras. Direct link to the installer if you'd rather skip a step.