ExplorerPatcher broke the look of the taskbar

Thanks for the warm welcome, OrthodoxWin32! I've gone ahead and replaced the DLL, which made the taskbar usable again, but got rid of a chunk of the themeing once the fix actually kicked in. And... the context menu broke again, this time without any recourse. Is it an issue with the immersive context menus? I went into regedit on impulse to disable it, but stopped myself, since it's probably better to ask before going in for no real reason. It's become clear I dove into the process ass first and probably missed some crucial steps, so it's natural that I'm starting to feel I'm missing something, but... hmm...

Here's how it currently looks like:


If ExplorerPatcher doesn't work out, are there any alternatives? I don't mind imperfect implementation, but the few days I've been using it were pretty bumpy. Including an explorer.exe crash loop that triggered almost unprovoked which seems to be a common issue that just happens sometimes, after a bit of reading around. It's not like Microsoft makes it easy for stuff like this to flourish easily though, especially with how stuff just breaks randomly between updates, I don't blame the dev at all ^^;;

It's not worth starting another thread since it's an issue pertaining to this that occurred before, but after Win10 updated without me catching it it seems like the text the taskbar has completely disappeared again:



Clock is missing too, but that's pack and parcel for this kind of issue. I've messed around with Open Shell, Explorerpatcher, 7+ Tweaker, Simple Classic Theme and of course native taskbar settings and several restarts... nothing seems to be working? After months of seamless use it seems to have broken due to this update. Everything else works fine though. My current taskbar settings:



It's a serious eyesore honestly, not having text on the taskbar, so I've elected to hide the taskbar automatically for now... please let me know if any other settings are needed for troubleshooting.