task bar question

This has come up before. The responses are along these lines:

"I researched this about a year ago and concluded that it's a "feature" of Win98. You can click on the phantom button and it goes away. I never found any way to prevent it."

"The blank taskbar button "feature" is very well known and is believed to be associated with a combination of Open GL drivers and specific programming code detail related to closing program windows. Hence, it is most common with screen savers. Because this"feature" interacts with the desktop explorer, you can try a couple of different approaches. First, you may want to check for an updated video driver or Open GL drivers. You might also find that minimizing a window, then closing it from the taskbar will prevent the phantom buttons (not helpful with screensavers). Also, upgrade or update Internet Explorer. This will copy over the files that control the "desktop update" and it is rumored that machines with the later versions of IE have fewer phantom buttons. There is no single answer to this one that I know of, but these things have helped me in the past."

In win98SE these "ghost" buttons are a side effect of the May 22, 2000, Mapped drives shutdown and 1394 storage updates.

I've only had this problem on a few of my computers. I've had some success with uninstalling/re-installing the updates. It seems that the ghost buttons get triggered again if the user messes with the screen saver. I'm still looking into that though.

Check out this link
http://www.generation.net/~hleboeuf/taskbar.htm#TASKBAR5