Taskbar Issue

What should be happening here is that the start bar is hidden and to bring it up all you need do is bring the mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen and get to the start bar. However because it is mobile it is possible that it could be at the top of the screen or on one of the sides depending on who owned it previously preference.

Just drag the pointer to the bottom and if that doesn't bring anything up move to the top and then the sides the start bar should be hidden in one of those places.

Col

Have you tried hitting the Windows key?

That should bring up the taskbar.

Remember, the taskbar can be moved to any edge of the desktop.
Try all 4 sides to see if the previous user placed it on a side or the top.

If not, watch the edges of the screen closely as you move your cursor to the center of each edge.
If the cursor changes to a resize cursor, click and drag it. That should bring back a shrunken taskbar.

Another thought, would be to open msconfig and see if any taskbar manager programs run at startup.

If all else fails, Windows 98 takes fairly well to being reinstalled over itself. This usually brings back features that have been inadvertently disabled.

Chas

ctrl+alt+Esc is the keybd comb. for Start button.
I gotta wonder: how did you look at help?

Are you familiar with Safe Mode?
You can also try step by step confirmation to see where it is hanging and post back.

Cold boot and tap the f8 key during the black screen boot. eventually you'll get the Startup menu and you can pick Safe mode and other tshotting modes from it.

to me it sounds like you are hung. i wonder if you have any hd activity.
it could be anything on inherited laptop so i would start with most likely which imho is spyware/virus, bad or missing driver, bad hardware, software conflict.

I would start it in Safe Mode and see if I can see my taskbar then. If yes, I would check Device Manager for Yellow.

if no yellow i'd use Start/run/msconfig and post what was automatically starting up.

I have tried all the immediate steps to recover my taskbar, check desktop, msconfig, keyboard shortcuts. I have a 600x800 view that I am unable to change. Monitor driver is S3 inc. ViRGE/MX. I re-installed and still nothing. I do not know why it disappeared Thursday. I am able to drag a document, or web page down until just the Internet Explorer and 3 buttons title bar are seen. Is it down there and I cannot get to it to move it? Do keyboard S/C work, I just cannot see the menu pop up?

Actually Ctr-Esc will bring up the menu.

It is interesting that you said you can't change screen resolution. Is the screen size somehow preventing the taskbar to display properly?

Check the device manager (quickest way is to right-click My Computer and go to properties; then device manager tab.) Be sure you have the proper drivers installed for your video card and your monitor.

You should also be able to get to your taskbar properties from the Control Panel.

Hi,

Well the only thing that is left to do is reformat, that will fix the problem for sure. Well it should.

Rick

why are you rejecting answers of the members ? Place some comments with your detail problem.

Their answers are perfact ones as I know.

I am annoyed with your rejection of answers. Put some comments why you have rejected them.

So we can get better answer for your problem. Which may help you.

Waiting for your comments.

Thanks for everyone's input, so far. I have looked into everything I know about the taskbar and am not able to get it back into view. I am not able to click on Start, so I am not able to click Start/Settings, etc. I can get to Control Panel via My Computer, but do not know how to get to taskbar properties. I do not have a systray, in view, no clock, in view, no Start, in view. I am able to see my desktop icons. Still trying to figure it out without re-installing windows.

I sent this to you via email too:
(and I concur with the need for more comments.)

Turns out I was mistaken about the control panel; taskbar properties are not there in win98. If the windows key or Ctr-Esc works to bring up the start menu; then you can access te properties from the settings section of the start menu.

One other though occured to me. Is it possible the taskbar is hidden and has been moved? try moving your mouse to each side of the screen (Top, bottom, left, right) and see if it appears.

Try these links, they all had the same problem.
http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/132877.html

Go to each side of the screen if a little black 2 sided arrow appears, hold the left key down on the mouse and move it away from that side task bar should appear, size was shrunk to nothing.

On wrong PC, however if I remember correctly even Win 95 had an icon in the control panel labeled taskbar and start menu.

Well I've seen something similar on an XP Home machine yesterday where the Start Bar had disappeared and it was impossible to get back.

In that case the machine had been infected with a virus that had removed the ability of the user to actually use the computer and it was acting as a Zombie transmitting a constant stream of data. Their ISP usage log showed 800 MEG in something like 6 hours which was 4 times the monthly limit in that particular case.

It might not be of any use but in that case I had to remove the HDD save the data and then wipe it as a lot of Windows was missing and do a total reinstall then move the data back.

Col

Here is the issue...I think my display is a full screen. I can use the Window key and arrow up and over to the taskbar properties, I can't see the box when it pops up. It's all down below my view. This makes it so I can't click on it, or get my mouse to it, to move it. I am going to try to unhide it and always on top it totally blind. Is there a way to correct a full screen desktop?

After all these answers; all of which have apparentely not helped; you should consider reinstalling windows.

You can do this in 98 without wiping any data or software. Of course, because this is a new pc you inherited there probably isn't anything on it you need to keep anyway.

Save yourself more headache. Reinstall 98.

Have you tried changing the screen resolution or re-installing your video drivers to correct your 'full-screen' problem? Once you do that then maybe one of the solutions given above would work.

As others have said, if all else fails then save your data (if you need to) and re-install Windows. Hopefully you can get this resolved.

The Taskbar can be disabled in the registry. Check to see if this is true on your pc.

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/154/ has instructions.

A quick way to check without going through all that is open up your registry using regedit.exe. Do a search for "NoSetTaskbar" without the quotes. If you find it; change the value from 1 to 0. (It should be safe to delete the value as well.

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