Windows XP Toolbar

[Charles 22]

I have the following problem. At work, I often have multiple sessions of another program up on the pc next to me. I have so many that with WXP it will knock them into one stack, just like many IE users see with having more than say 5 IE sessions. I don't like it like that at all. For IE it might not be so bad, but with this other program I have to update it every once in a while or it will time out and I will have logon all over again.

I found a way around this though, as with the other program, the viewing area doesn't matter very much, in that I will stretch the toolbar larger than the number of sessions I have, to which it will thereby lay each session out singularly. The problem is that 2 out of the last three days (I'm not used to using XP for business applications) I somehow end up mis-clicking one of the sessions and hit the toolbar instead, and this makes the 2-3 lines of space compress back to the usual one line again, which, of course, stacks all those programs back on top of each other instead of them being spread out. When I stretch the toolbar back to 2-3 spaces high, they don't unstack. Does anybody know how I can spread these back out without logging off all of them and starting over?

 

[bhsup]

Right click on your taskbar anywhere and select "properties". Unclick the "group similiar taskbar buttons" option. Click OK. Now, it'll keep them seperate, just making them shorter and shorter to fit.

UP TO A POINT! If you get a VERY large number of windows open for the app, it will force a scroll arrow on the right of the taskbar. I hit that limit at 26 app windows at 1280 x 960 screen resolution. Just tested it with notepad.

 

[Turner]

It also depends on how many lines you're running your taskbar....

 

[Charles 22]

Alright, great! Thanks guys! What a relief!

 

[Brian Boru]

If you want to work with the Taskbar 2-3 lines high, after you've set it, right-click the Taskbar and click "Lock the Taskbar."

 

[Charles 22]

If you want to work with the Taskbar 2-3 lines high, after you've set it, right-click the Taskbar and click "Lock the Taskbar."

Oh yeah, I know, but having to use properties to change something on the toolbar is pretty radical, afterall, using properties on files allows little or nothing to be done.

Oh, I see what you're thinking. You're thinking if the toolbar is locked I can't accidentally shrink it to one line. That's probably true, though I could have sworn it was locked a lot of the time. To use the properties method though is the best of both worlds, because that way I'm already using just one line, and if I do that same funky click, how could it screw me up then? Knowing that properties is useful in XP for the toolbar is good.

 

[Speedo]

IIRC if you have the "group similar taskbar buttons" option enabled, it will start to group them once you have 3-4 windows open, no matter how large the task bar is.

 

[Charles 22]

IIRC if you have the "group similar taskbar buttons" option enabled, it will start to group them once you have 3-4 windows open, no matter how large the task bar is.

Oh no, in this case if you have a large enough toolbar it will keep laying them out, as that's what I was doing, initially, to combat the problem. Once you accidentally shrink it back to one space again, that's when they bunch. The key is that once it hits the end-of-line, well, maybe one less session than that, it will then bunch. If you make the entire screen a toolbar you will have a lot of sessions before it bunchs (100 maybe?).