Recently I hit with an issue on my Windows machine that the Language icon not appearing in taskbar when I’m working on a VDI’s golden image. I’m pretty sure that all the required languages had been properly installed.
Anyway, I blogged about how to add multiple languages in multiple profiles in same Windows 10 machines. If you are interested you can see it here: Windows 10: Add additional languages/keyboard to multiple profiles in same machine
Now back to the issue, I’ve google around to find various fixes either in Settings or registry tweaks. But it doesn’t help. Then I finally managed to find out what was the issue. I realized that the “Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel” service is not started on the Windows machine. Now we simply needs to enable this service.
To do so, login to your Windows machine and navigate to Services (You can right click on your Windows icon > Run > type “services.msc” or Win+R on your keyboard and type it).
Navigate and find the service “Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel“. If the service is set to disable, change it to Manual or Automatic. This will allow the service to start.
Make sure to reboot your Windows machine and login again. The language icon should appear this time without any issues.
The problem for us is that we ran the Optimization Tool when preparing VMware Horizon’s VDI golden image. The earlier version of this tool will disable the “Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel” service as part of the optimization process. This causes the language icon not appearing on the taskbar no matter what we tweak on the registry settings.
You may see here if you are interested to find out more on Windows OS Optimization Tool for VMware Horizon. Based on the Optimization Tool page, there were many optimizations in previous versions of the template that were not selected by default. Some of these cause undesirable effects if used, so they have been removed from the template to avoid confusion.
I hope anyone who is reading this can benefit or help you in certain way.
Thank you