Double Click Required to Maximize Running Pinned Program on Taskbar

Hi everyone,

My apologies if this has been brought up already. I did some searching, but couldn't find anything relevant.

I've been doing a lot to my installation of Windows 7 lately. Tweaking it and adjusting things to really customize my experience. I'm not sure if this was always there, but just recently, I've actually noticed it:

The situation is, I have an open program on my taskbar (ex. Firefox), which is pinned. I also have other programs pinned to my taskbar, like Thunderbird. Initially, after I boot up the computer, switching between pinned programs is fine. It takes one click on the icon (on the taskbar) to open up the minimized program. However, eventually, I find that it takes two or more clicks to open that program. The first click does nothing, then the second or third click finally maximizes the program.

After becoming annoyed by this, I started to carefully watch what I was doing to see if I could catch any kind of connection between my working habits and the incidence of the glitch. I was able to reproduce the problem in one way.

I often keep multiple Wordpad documents open, which I take notes in. I noticed that after a fresh reboot, everything would work fine (single clicks only necessary to open minimized programs) until I had Wordpad open. As soon as I had one or two Wordpad documents open, programs would start to become less responsive in terms of maximizing them from the taskbar. Again, it would take two clicks on the respective icon (or more) to maximize the program.

I figured I'd found it, so I totally switched over to a free Wordpad alternative, LibreOffice, and customized everything in there to my liking (I actually like it much more than Wordpad, not surprisingly!).

Everything worked fine! I could have multiple documents open in LibreOffice and single-click on minimized programs to open them (to my heart's content).

Then, I opened Skype to quickly check if anyone was online and realized that as soon as I did that, the problem returned. Multiple clicks were necessary to maximize a program from the taskbar.

I really don't know what's going on. Again, I've been fiddling with themes, got a fancy mouse that I could assign hotkeys to, etc etc. I wouldn't bother you all with this, but as you probably know, Windows is a huge mess of variables and finding out what specific variable is causing your problem can be tricky sometimes.

Am I just imagining that it was Wordpad and Skype that triggered the problems? I just restarted my computer and opened my LibreOffice documents (and all of my usual programs) and have been avoiding opening Skype. Everything is working fine and I'm having no trouble clicking on minimized programs on the taskbar. I can only expect that Skype, Wordpad and, probably, some other unknown specific programs will cause the necessary clicking to go haywire again. What could be going on? I started uninstalling various stuff to play around with what might have thrown things off, but it's not working and I'm slowly undoing all of my customization.

Thank you so much for any help and sorry to be such a n00b.

Heh.

I might have found it. I think it might be the 'Taskbar Thumbnail Preview'. If I click too fast between windows before the taskbar thumbnail preview appears, sometimes, the program won't maximize. Maybe that's what was actually happening and I was just making false assumptions about specific programs throwing things off track?

At any rate, I just installed '7+ Taskbar Tweaker' and disabled thumbnail previews. So far, things are going well -- no errors to report. I'll report back after I spend another day or two clicking around, as usual.

If anyone has any other advice in the meantime, I'd be thankful for it!

Thanks again.

UPDATE:

So far, everything is working just fine now that I've disabled the 'Taskbar Thumbnail Preview' feature with '7+ Taskbar Tweaker'. I think I am just a 'fast clicker' and when I was rapidly switching between programs on the taskbar, the combination of having multiple Wordpad documents open and having to call-up those thumbnails for the grouped Wordpad documents was throwing me off. Also, I have found that if I wait a microsecond (heh -- I guess I'm impatient!), if I click and don't get a response on a minimized program on the taskbar, it does eventually open (seemingly, every time).

I've had one glitch since I posted my working solution, but I think it's just the program. I use 'AIMP4', a music-playing program...and it has a fancy skin on it. I think, every now and then, it just doesn't respond because I'm kind of pushing the limits of the program and heavily skinning it. It's always been a semi-glitchy program, but mostly, it's my favorite media player out there. Even with that, I could have been imagining things.

Again, my apologies for the n00b post. Glad I could figure it out mostly on my own. Great forums here, so I'm looking forward to reading up on all things Windows 7-related as much as possible.

Thanks for reading. :)