Vista, Windows 7 Taskbar Wont Hide, Successful Workaround

Suddenly, my trusty taskbar on Vista, which was set to auto-hide (very handy for saving space on laptops), has stopped to auto-hide. Checkout for a brilliant workaround...


Suddenly, my trusty taskbar on Vista, which was set to auto-hide (very handy for saving space on laptops), has stopped to auto-hide. It just sticks, regardless of the other settings under Taskbar Properties/Taskbar/. Even tried checking and unchecking "Auto-hide the taskbar" several times, to no avail.

Having recently played with placing making my second display a primary display inside Control Panel/Appearance and Personalization/Personalization/Display Settings, this might have been the cause. Dunno.

I first found the solution to be TaskbarSlapper (downloadable program, works fine, no spyware as far as I know), but that only worked one time, and now, it doesn't work anymore.

So I dug deeper, and here is an inelegant solution that, however, worked for me: From: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winvista/1189550818.

To solve your problem: Open Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc), select the ^Processes page, highlight 'explorer.exe' and click the 'End Process' button.

The Taskbar will vanish.

Now go to the ^Applications page and click the 'New task...' button. Type "explorer" and click OK.

The Taskbar will return and behave correctly. Until the next time.

One downside of this fix: some apps which insert their icons into the Systray at boot time may not do so again. The app will still be still running -- it's just that it will have no Systray icon. 

As I say, it worked for me, with the above mentioned side effects. Beats rebooting Vista, at least for me.

If this works for you, or not, leave me a comment.

If you have a better solution, leave me a comment below.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

This VB Script will do the same:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Name = 'explorer.exe'")
For Each objProcess in colProcessList
objProcess.Terminate()
Next

Just put in a text file and save as "whateever.vbs".

As for apps that don't restore their icons, they need to be updated. Contact the programmers and tell them about the problem.

Disclosure said...

Thank you, anon, for this, apparently, 1-click solution!

Disclosure said...

And, I can report that it worked!! Actually, it is a one double-click solution! Thanks again, Anonymous!

Anonymous said...

Wait, so what do you do w/ that once you save it as a txt file, & does it matter if it's not .doc (I use .odt). The above seems to have worked at least thanks:)

Disclosure said...

Well, you have to double click, anon...

Anonymous said...

This works great. One thing I just noticed. When I killed explorer and then started it back up, I had a task in the taskbar for Adobe. It seemed to be an orphan task of some sort but it had the focus in the taskbar. There was no desktop window for it, it was just this invisible parasite. So it looks like somehow an orphan process of Adobe got started. Since I couldn't task switch to it to give it focus, the taskbar never auto-hides. I'm betting if I had known it was this process I could have just killed it directly (instead of killing and restarting explorer). Not sure if there is anyway to tell that, but I'm going to track this and if it's always the same app causing the auto-hide to stop working I will try killing it directly next time.

Disclosure said...

Anon, yeah, I totally agree! Let us know of your findings about the orphan tasks, or any task that might interfere with the taskbar in windows 7. Killing explorer.exe is an awful way to fix things.

Anonymous said...

Thank you! Your solution worked perfect on my windos 7 machine. I looked everywhere for the solution, and yours was the only one to work. Note to self, read everything, I freaked out for a momennt after stopping on the step of killing explorer and having all windows unavailable! Next step solved this. Thanx again!

Disclosure said...

Thanks, Anon... Reads like a horror story with a happy ending doesn't it.

MorbidIllusion said...

Thanks worked for me :))))))))))) tried various other link all failed. this one is a win!!

Anonymous said...

it worked for me

frankenmouse said...

AWESOME! Super simple and doesn't require me to waste time restarting the system.

Rob Paige said...

Thanks dude. Much nicer than having to reboot.

The Reginator said...

It worked using the Task Manager.
(Due to problems I had a long time ago I now have a shortcut for it on the task bar ... always easy to find.)
Thanx.

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