Taskbar stealing focus

I set my Win XP's taskbar to auto-hide, but I have a problem with the taskbar appearing automatically & stay for about 10-15 seconds everytime I launch a program & XP puts an icon in bottom right corner.
For instance, when I connect to the internet and XP puts a connection icon in the taskbar, the taskbar will always stay for at least 10 secs, and there is nothing I can do about it , except waiting for it to disappear automatically.

Is there any way to prevent XP to do this ? or at least reduce the time ?

Have you tried setting it back to the default setting, rebooting, change it back to the Auto Hide setting and rebooting again?

The other thing I was thinking is, what do you have running in the system tray? I have seen where third party programs that run in the system tray can hang the "Auto Hide". I try to keep as few things in there as posible. It does hinder performance. A lot of third party programs by default will place themselves in the system tray. Sometimes it offers added features, but those come at a cost. Other times they are more or less just an icon.