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The task bar is a busy place, and there are lots of things on it; the start button and menu, the quick launch bar (if you have that enabled) and on the far right, the notification area. Most all of those are configurable to some degree, but the area where buttons representing your "currently running programs" is not. It's always supposed to be there, there's no way to turn it off.
As a result, no way to turn it on should it disappear.
Well, no obvious way.
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Unfortunately, I have gotten reports of the "running programs" area going away. I have no real idea of how it happens, but, clearly, it does.
Restoring, while not obvious, is not hard. It appears to only need a registry change and a restart of Windows Explorer.
Kelly Theriot, a Microsoft MVP, has a set of tweaks available at Kelly's Korner. They're fairly light on documentation, and perhaps even a bit techie if you want to understand them. On the tweaks page scroll down to item #240, and click on "Programs Aren't Minimized in the Taskbar". That will run, or download, a "vbs" (VBScript) program which will, after confirming, reset the Taskbar's properties. Note that several other aspects of the Taskbar will also be reset to their default states, but you should get your "running programs" area back.
Related:
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Ask Leo! - My TaskBar is too small to be useful, what can I do?
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Ask Leo! - The task bar on my windows XP machine has become hidden, how do I get it back?
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Kelly Theriot - Kelly's Korner.
Article C2376 - June 21, 2005
Man, I hate windows but still dont have the same resources in Linux and a good Mac its way too expensive for me....
Thanks God there is blogs like yours to help dummy programmer like me to fix this trash windows sys.
Thanks alot!
Posted by: Taniguchi, J. at June 20, 2009 4:05 AMThanks Leo, the fix of registry worked very well.
Posted by: Ayman at July 22, 2009 2:51 AMI am glad that I cam by your useful page.
Thanks again :)
I ran the script and it worked fine until I rebooted the computer and the taskbar goes back to the same. I re-run the script and all is well. Somehow the settings are getting changed when I reboot. What is happening?
Posted by: azscorp at August 13, 2009 3:40 PMazscorp
This is not working for me. They show up for like half a second after I run the script and then are gone again. Anybody have any suggestions?
Posted by: Kelly at September 8, 2009 12:50 PMI have the same problem. Does this tweak also work with Vista?
Regards
Posted by: pevinco at February 4, 2010 3:07 PM