Taskbar will no longer AutoHide

The thing that causes this to happen with my computer is the Reminders list in Outlook. If I close the reminder window autohide works.
It used to do this in XP, I thought it was to remind me to action my reminders. Worked too

CommonTater said:

This is about "focus"... which window is at the top of the keyboard and mouse stack and will receive input.

If you mouse up and get the taskbar to pop open then click on it (the bar itself, not an icon)... it will never close... because the mouse focus is now set to the taskbar. To get it to close, you simply click on the open area of your desktop... or launch a program... as soon as focus is shifted away from the taskbar it will hide.

The apparent lockups come from some applications not resetting keyboard focus to the foreground window or desktop when exiting. Simply clicking on something else should close it.

The other big cause is notifications... Those little ballons that pop up from the taskbar... the #$%@$ action center drove me nuts until I disabled it.

I use auto-hide all the time, and basically, CommonTater nailed it, as far as the "problems" I have had with auto-hide, which turned out not to be problems.

I noticed this on Vista and now 7.