I lose the program icons in the task bar when they are minimized. The last time I turned on my machine before the problem occured, I only watched a DVD movie with it. Does anyone know what has happened to my machine? What should I do? Thanks in advance.

Do you mean the icons in the bottom right corner or the small boxes showing open applications on the task bar itself? Is your task bar visible or does it hide? Do you get any tool tips when you mouse over the area where the icons are?

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Sorry, I'm not talking about the tray icons at the bottom right corner. What I meant was the small boxes showing the running programs which we can click on to switch programs. When I minimized an application window, its icon disappeared in the task bar. So, I could not restore the program again by simply clicking its icon at the bottom of the desktop.

I will assume this is a Windows XP machine.

It is a weird problem indeed. The simplest solution I can offer, is for you to do a system restore to a date just before the DVD episode. Did you try that already?

Searching the Net [running programs missing "task bar" OR taskbar], I see similar issues being reported but without any solution yet. Some propose installing some program to fix the taskbar, which probably involves automated registry edits or something.

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It does sound like a registry problem, though AllExperts has a similar discussion.

Other than that, I'm at a loss. I've never encountered nor heard of this problem before.

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Thanks for everyone's reply. Before I posted my issue here, I've searched for this issue through some search-engines. But the results I got were same as admin - no solutions. I think I will try System Restore before I decide to re-format my PC. Thanks again to admin and crystalattice.

Before you reformat your PC I would recommend Creating a New user account...

It could just be a small problem with your Registry being corrupt... I would recommend the System Restore, if that fails to Create a New User account...

Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Create a new account -> Adminstrator

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I have a similar problem. I am using Windows XP Pro Version 2002 SP 2. I started off using the "group similar buttons together" feature for running programs on the task bar. The problem with that was that XP kept rearranging the order within the groups; I could have 5 instances of Oracle, yet every time I selected that group I would have to go through every one to find the schema I needed. So to get around that problem I switched back to a non-grouped view. This works great except that every now and then I will lose the last program button if it does not have the focus. I don't have to minimize the window, just switch to another window, and poof, it is gone from the taskbar. If I have minimized that window I am screwed, otherwise I have to minimize each window until I get back to the window in question, and once I select it, voila, it returns to the taskbar.