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I was wondering if there was a fix for this:
When I move the taskbar to the top of the screen the "show hidden icons" button on the system tray flashes and I have to time my click to the right moment in the cycle of flashes. This happens on both Vista and XP machines that I regurlarly use.
Maybe Micro$oft wants to ensure that everyone keeps the taskbar at the bottom?
Anyway, love the geek website and have used a lot of the tips and tricks to customize and tweak my computer, thanks.
edmenje
Hi edmenje. Welcome to HTG.
I'm seeing the same thing. If you have the taskbar to the smallest size, the flashing occurs when
you hover over the upper portion of the button. If you hover over the lower portion, it doesn't flash.
Also if you re-size the taskbar to the next larger size, the flashing does not occur.
This is indeed strange behavior and I don't have an explanation for it, but these are the only "fixes"
I could come up with.
Thanks for responding bartman,
I tried enlarging the taskbar and you're right, hovering the pointer at the lower portion it doesn't flash. I guess if I want to keep the smaller taskbar I'll just have to live with a bit of erratic behavior. A larger taskbar would defeat all of the other customizations I did: set the win7 iconized registry hack, Vista Glazz with a super-clear theme that has the smallest vertical dimension to the taskbar ---all to make it less intrusive to the wallpaper and overall theming I've done.
Since I noticed this behavior in both XP and Vista I'm wondering if it is still a bug in Win7. Anyone checked out that? I'd love to hear if will still do that when I move to 7.
edbanger
edmenje, hello. The Taskbar Notification Area has been completely redesigned in Windows 7. The way that the icons are hidden, the icon used to show them, and the way they are shown has all changed. I moved my taskbar to the top of the screen in Windows 7 (RTM) and it works just fine at a 1-row height. There is no flickering or trouble clicking the show icon.
You can see how it works in much detail here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u.....11448.aspx
I tried to reproduce this behavior in Vista, but I was running in a Virtual Machine (VM) and didn't see it. That might have something to do with the VM, but it is a genuine copy of Vista. One thing that I noticed while testing this was that tooltips are enabled by default on a fresh Vista install. I saw the tooltip popping up when I would hover over the show hidden icons gadget and it made me wonder if it could be part of the problem. It's a bit of a long shot, but try disabling tooltips and see if it changes this behavior. The setting is in Control Panel, Folder Options, on the View tab, and it's called "Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items".
Scott,
You're on the right track with the popup description except that I can't disable it. Your suggestion does indeed supress the popups in folders but the taskbar still popups the "tooltip". Controls for the taskbar behaviour are probably in some .dll or .dll.mui file in system 32 folder and I'm not experienced enough yet to know where to start to track that down and change the settings.
I can place the cursor at the bottom 2 or 3 pixels of the button there is no flashing. If I then wait for the popup to close I can hover the cursor up the button and it continues to stay stable, this is why I think it's the popup that's the culprit, but how to disable it...I just don't know.
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