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  • #2187089

    double entries on Windows XP taskbar

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    by wyrmlord ·

    Hello everyone,
    I looked for a similar problem in TR Q&A but could not find it; perhaps I’m the first one to suffer from this.
    About two weeks ago, some users started signalling a strange symptom on their Win XP Pro boxes: all apps they opened appeared twice on the taskbar. In effect there were TWO taskbars side by side; you could see it by unlocking the tkb (as per right-click) and looking at the ‘pipes’ that usually separate toolbars. I tried everything I could think of, locking, unlocking, moving the ‘pipes’ about, deactivating toolbars, expanding and shrinking the tkb, changing resolutions, themes, appearances etc. The best I could get was to shorten the 2nd tkb so that it showed only one app at a time (plus of course the much-maligned scroll buttons).
    When I went to see what toolbars were ‘on’, I was surprised to find “Quick Launch” and “Language Bar” plus from 3 to 7 (!) “The Language Bar”s. But even deactivating “The’s” availed me not, there were still two taskbars.
    Now, the problems correlates in time with the arrival of a set of new GPOs (our DC is a Win2k3 box), and all affected users were part of the “G Users” GPO setting. Perhaps a glitch in the policy, except that not all “G Users” were so affected, in fact only 10 or so (as it stands at the moment) out of almost 50!
    LAN is protected by two HW firewalls plus some FW ones, and boxes have the latest pattern of TrendMicro’s OfficeScan on them. Malware is right out… I think, anyway the users in question are not ones to go gallavating across the Internet.
    Ideas, anyone? Please refrain from suggesting third-party solutions, though; these are corporate boxes (and the corp is MUCH bigger than I) and foreign installs are disallowed. And I’m pretty positive that the problem was NOT caused by a third-party boo-boo.
    Thanks for your suggestions/answers.
    Wyrm

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    • #3177655

      Reply To: double entries on Windows XP taskbar

      by jimklallsoo ·

      In reply to double entries on Windows XP taskbar

      http://www.pcbanter.net/showthread.php?t=676078&page=1

      Try this page someone here had a similar problem apparantly XP only handles 17 open apps.

      Do your users have more than that open i gues not all of them will have but after searching long and hard this is the best i can come up with.

      Please let me know if this resolves your issue

      • #3176455

        Reply To: double entries on Windows XP taskbar

        by wyrmlord ·

        In reply to Reply To: double entries on Windows XP taskbar

        Sorry, not even close. The discussion you pointed me to was all about grouping/compressing buttons before the scroll arrows kick in. My users can have a single app open (and quite often they do, in most cases less than 5 anyway) and still the “second taskbar” separator is on. No way to switch it off, even without Quick Launch the scrollers appear as soon as you open one lousy app!!!
        I showed the users how to make it less prominent and that’s about it. If they are promoted to local admins, the separator goes away, but that’s not the way to work in domain environment 🙁
        So again, sorry, but that’s not the answer I was looking for.

    • #3176454

      Reply To: double entries on Windows XP taskbar

      by wyrmlord ·

      In reply to double entries on Windows XP taskbar

      This question was closed by the author

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