How to unfreeze the audio menu in Windows 11 without restarting the computer?

One of the common issues that I've seen on multiple machines in both Windows 10 and Windows 11 is that when an audio device is disconnected, or when an application tries to change Bluetooth mode between Headphones and Headset , the menu for sound in the task bar becomes inaccessible. Sometimes this resolves by restart, sometimes reconnecting the device is enough. My question here is which service manages this icon/menu on Windows 11, where reconnecting the device does not seem to fix this. To be clear, this icon: It does not do anything when clicked after disconnecting bluetooth device. I am e

Question by Tomáš Zato on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.