Arcdesktop is missing drop-down menus/tool ribbons, what's the bug/issue?

[MatthewElbert1]

When I opened a .mxd on arcdesktop yesterday, my toolsets and drop-down ribbons were gone--that was fairly easily to fix, I just had to go back under the customizable options and re-select all the tool ribbons I had set previously (but still a pain).  This morning however, it was a step further, and the layers in my TOC were completely disappeared (not just there with the broken link-red check mark).  Any ideas on what is going on or how to recover? I'd really rather not have to reload all the .shp files onto these maps.

Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

-Matt

[JaredPoe1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Matthew,

I'm curious if you've tried resetting your application profile for ArcGIS Desktop. While this workflow isn't specific to your exact issue, this has been known to resolve many weird issues such as this. The workflow for doing this is linked below.

Link: https://community.esri.com/thread/78694

Best,

Jared

[MatthewElbert1]

Thanks Jared,

I went through the process of 'renaming the ESRI folder under %APPDATA%' and that seemed to fix the template/toolset issues.  Now I've talked with ESRI support and am trying to figure out why my maps are completely wiping my shapefiles from under my group layers in the TOC every time I re-open Arcdesktop in the morning.  I'm going to go ahead and re-install ArcMap, try saving/closing/re-opening on another computer--to see if what happens.  If you have any other ideas as to what could be causing the issue, please let me know.

Thanks,

-Matt

[JaredPoe1]

Hi Matt,

I'm glad to hear that resetting the application template helped resolve the original issues. I'm sorry to hear that you are seeing additional issues with the table of contents in ArcMap. I agree that a fresh reinstall will probably be useful for this situation. 

Let me know how this goes and if you're still having issues, feel free to reach out and I'd be happy to help.

Best,

Jared