Taskbar Trouble

Hey,

I've been having trouble with windows for about a week now. Once I've loaded onto my desktop and my computer is in a "usable" state The taskbar locks up and refuses to acknowledge if I click on it. Any bubbles that come up refuse to respond as well. This is getting frustrating. I have no idea whats caused the problem but I'm hoping you can give some suggestions. I've attached a screenshot of my taskbar at the end of this post.

I'm running Windows XP SP2 on a home-grown system.

The black area at the left end only appears when the taskbar is refusing to respond. If I were to lock my machine then un-lock it the shole taskbar and any bubbles woukld show what there was on the screen before I preformed the action.

You are running XP? Drop it back to the XP theme and see if it has the same issue.

nah, I've had it before I changed to the vista theme as well. No difference.

Is that an icon for Tigerpaw Software "Service and Repair" I see?

Where, I've got desktop, firefox, thunderbird, winamp, windows explorer, character map, Proxy server, firefox and DivX in that order. All of them are unuseable with windows in it's current state!

SkuToV said:

Where, I've got desktop, firefox, thunderbird, winamp, windows explorer, character map, Proxy server, firefox and DivX in that order. All of them are unuseable with windows in it's current state!

Click to expand...

I gotcha, tha proxy server icon looks just like the service database we use at the office.

Have you instaled anything new? Maybe try doing a quick system restore to the last time you remember it working.

The thing i installed most recently efore this started happening was yahoo widgets. I stopped running that quite soon after but it didn't help.

Go to the following site...

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/taskbarplus!.htm

... and click on the "Restore to XP Default" link on the LH side, underneath the Taskbar heading, to download the "xp_taskbar_desktop_fixall.vbs" file. To see what's contained in the script before running it, you can open it in Notepad to view the contents.