I was very lucky to stumble into the Task Manager small footprint accidentally several years ago, and use it all the time. There are several discussions of this now on the MS KB (sorry, I am desperate).

Came accross this post - been searching everywhere for a solution to my almost related problem, so I joined, hoping for a solution.

It may sound trivial, but I like to "hide when minimized" Task Manager, and just have the dynamic icon in the system tray to check if something is tying up my processor. On my XP Pro laptop, this icon appears 95% of the time. On my XP Home desktop, it may appear on the first or second start of Task Manager, or it may take 20 or 30 tries of starting and exiting Task Manager to get it to appear. VERY FRUSTRATING!!!

It does not seem to matter which Task Manager options are set, nor does it matter how I start Task manager (task bar, Cntrl+Alt+Del, or Cntrl+Shift+Esc).

Anyone know anything about this? Can't find any mention of this icon on MS support or anywhere else.

thx

Guess I was lucky. I thought it was a virus also. I ran a virus scan(found one virus puke: ) and a couple different spyware scans. I did a search and found this site and started reading. All told, I only spent a couple of hours solving the problem. Thanks for the help, I was also thinking it was a virus using the task manager to hide.

Thanks a lot. I had the same problem with my task manager. I searched thru google and hit this spot. I am now a registered member of techspot. Hi everyone.

Hey thanks, this was realy helpful.
That is such a stupid setup. I guess the ppl who made it have an interesting sense of humor.

I also signed up because of finding this and becoming impressed with the forum.

OMG,
A Million Thanks to you guys....I registered to the site just for this. THANKS a lot...

um... i have a bit of a different problem. i can no longer shut of system processes in the task manger but i and the computer administrator. ive tried hijack this, etrust, spybot, and spysweeper. if anybody could help me it would be awsome. p2-267mhz, 96 ram, 6gig. xp pro

I have a problem as well. Anyone ever see this happen? None of the programs are accessible. (The picture is of poor quality but that's beside the point completely.)

Originally Posted by Rick
Hehe!

The answer is simple. Double click on the border of your task manager. Your normal controls will reappear. The border is the thick, empty space along the sides of the task manager.

This is by design.

If you'd like to place it in graph-only mode again, double click on the same border again
Learned Something New