I found a guide here that did the trick a few days ago:
viewtopic.php?t=55351#
Then last night, put the notebook to sleep and went for a walk. Resumed from sleep an hour later and the taskbar was gone, other missing elements on the screen, something seemed way off. So I restarted the computer and no GUI again. Not a big surprise knowing that a lot of people are still struggling with Nvidia resume from sleep issues on the interwebs. Thoughts? Should I just disable nvidia-resume and nvidia-suspend services as others have suggested?