Taskbar will no longer AutoHide

I have just had the same problem after I installed GlasserPojo extension on Firefox (it makes the menus and address bar glassy). The taskbar then started the weird behavior explained in the OP. I disabled the addon and it works just fine. Hope it helps.

Notification icons in the system tray can prevent the taskbar from auto-hiding sometimes. Did you recently install an application that has a noisy tray icon?

Hej folks,

I dunno if it helps bbut here is a solution for me and it worked fine:)

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ciao,
wolfie

My taskbar also occasionally refuses to autohide. So far, it appears that some particular open program causes this. Most recently, closing Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer v8 solved the problem. (And re-opening the program did not cause the problem to immediately recur.) Earlier notes suggested that unpinning programs from taskbar was the solution. I currently don't think this has anything to do with my problem - it's whether a particular program is open or not, not whether its icon is pinned.

I'll be doing additional careful monitoring and testing to nail this down further, so I'd appreciate hearing from anyone else who has useful data.

Im on an Asus k50 laptop. got it in the begining of November. It had vista on it. I had this problem often (and on other computers in past) it's very on/off kind of issue. no idea ever what causes it.

now i upgraded to W7 and just experiencing the same problem just now. i can't make it go away and usually it'll work for a few minutes if i disable autohide and enable it again, but that's doing nothing. i just ran disk defragment, full system scan (AVG Free anti virus) and nothing.

=(

-- At least 90% of the occurrences (on my system) are caused by a particular running application wanting attention. One clue is that the needy program may change its taskbar icon to have a brighter background color than usual. So the first thing to do when the problem occurs is to look for a "bold" taskbar icon, click it to bring that application window to the front, and take care of whatever that application is asking for. This is a "feature" not a "bug" .

-- Remember that even after you fix the underlying problem, the taskbar may remain displayed until you click on the desktop.

-- If the above doesn't identify the problem, minimize all applications to see if there is a small system or application notification window hiding back there somewhere. Such a window may also keep the taskbar displayed - dismiss it and the taskbar will hide.

-- An application that wants attention may also display its tiny icon in the "Notification Area" (the group of tiny icons at the right end of the taskbar), sometimes also displaying a balloon pointing at that icon. This might keep the taskbar from autohiding. Many programs still do not fully conform to Win7 standards in this respect. I've seen at least one older program where I had moved its icon to the "hidden" part of the notification area, and that icon did not jump down to the visible notification area when attention was wanted. This may also keep the taskbar displayed, with no visible clue to the problem. To investigate this, click the little "show hidden icons" arrow in the Notification area and mouseover each of the "hidden" icons. Normal icons will simply identify themselves with a popup message. An application needing attention may identify the problem in this popup. This is a flaw in the application, not in Windows 7.

-- The quickest and simplest fix when all of the above fails to solve the problem is to open Task Manager, kill the explorer.exe process, then re-start it. Task Manager makes this easy: In Task Manager, after right-clicking the process and clicking "end process", click File/New Task and enter "explorer" (you don't need the full path).

-- The application that most frequently causes the "no autohide" problem on my system is Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor, v.8. If I leave it running but minimized, it's almost certain to cause the "no autohide" problem within a few hours. It does change its taskbar icon to "bold" when this happens, and I now know to look for that. The odd thing is that the program never seems to actually want anything specific - it, like my cat, just periodically craves attention. Bringing up its window, then minimizing it again is all that's needed to fix the problem.

/Dave

Had the same thing going on. Mine is caused my Outlook Reminders coming up. Makes sense, I suppose.

try closing applications shown on the left side of the taskbar one by one. i had the same problem. when i closed the skype app the autohide kicked in. apparently an open session will prevent autohide.

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.