I find when the taskbar is not at the bottom, there are two bugs. I normally put it at the left side of the screen.

If I stretch out the taskbar to make it wider, do a "switch user", and return, the taskbar will be shrunk to the default size. The default size is about the width of an icon.

If I use auto-hide, do a "switch user", and return, I can't un-hide it with the mouse, until it's been un-hidden by other means, like pressing the "windows" key.

Can anyone else confirm these problem?


It doesn't surprise me that Windows taskbars are buggy when not at the bottom. XP's taskbar won't group tabs unless the taskbar is at the bottom.

Do you suppose I'm the only person in the world that doesn't have the taskbar at the bottom? Am I also only one of two people in the world that hides the taskbar? I know of one other person that hides it.

Have you tried doing a restart after changing the size? I remember with XP if it crashed for some reason before doing a restart any changes I made to anything on the task bar were undone.

I have re-booted Win7 RTM dozens of times and I've rebooted Win7 RC hundreds of times.

The taskbar width I set survives re-boots and survives logoffs. It's just "switch user" that causes it to shrink to the default width.

Similarly, after reboots and logoffs, my auto-hide works fine. It's only "switch user" that screws it up.


I've been trying to get someone else to confirm this problem on several forums to no avail. I guess I am the only person in the world who moves the taskbar from the bottom of the screen.

I never used auto hide, can't stand it. But I tried it out for your testing. Switched, it was fine. Moved it to the side and resized it and when I came back it was shrunk but was unable to unhide fine.

Thanks LordFett for testing. I don't understand the end of the sentence. I'm not sure if you had the problem of the mouse not being able to unhide it after a "switch user".

Can you confirm you did have the unhide problem?

Thanks,
Steve

No unhide problem, but it resized. I stretched it to 2x the width it was. switch user come back and it was single width, but unhide was fine with mouse.

Thanks LordFett. I really appreciate it.

It seems the shrinking taskbar is a bug in Win7. It exists in the RTM and RC versions. I did some more investigation. It happens when the taskbar is on the right or left. It does not happen when the taskbar is at the top or bottom. It only happens when auto-hide is used. And of course it is triggered by doing a "switch user" and coming back.

I wonder if it is possible to report this to Microsoft. Does the fact that I purchased the upgrade license entitle me to a little free service from Microsoft?

Steve

The failure to unhide with the mouse problem is more puzzling. It seems to be unique to this machine. Apparently my hardware and Win7 RTM don't play well together in this case.

I have 4 installations on this machine of Win7 RTM, 2 32 bit and 2 64 bit. All of them have this problem. I also have 2 installations of Win7 RC and 2 installations of XP on this machine and they don't have this problem.

I investigated this problem further. It only happens when the taskbar is on the left of the screen. It does not happen if the taskbar is on the right, top, or bottom. Normally when the taskbar is hidden, there is still a 2 pixel wide remnant of it that is visible. Apparently when the mouse pointer is over this remnant, the O.S. is triggered to un-hide the taskbar.

When the taskbar is on the left with auto-hide, and I do a "switch user" and come back, that 2 pixel remnant is not there. I need to get it back by pressing the "Windows" key.

It might seem like a simple hardware problem or incompatibility, but it is not that simple. Win7 RC and XP running on this machine don't have the problem. Very strange. The Win7 RC and Win7 RTM use the same display driver.