Task Manager on WinXP is screwed up. (please help)

Omg I feel like dumb. Moderator, could you lock this thread? lol

Do not feel bad at all. I too, suffered the same problem.

... And there was a thread several months ago dealing with the same topic..

Many forum members (many senior members I might add) here really put their heads together to figure that one out.

The easiest way to learn is from others, usually. So now you know.

I'm just glad that was the problem, rather than something else.

I have to admit - I fell prey to this exact same issue 2 weeks ago, and it drove me absolutely mad. And I only figured it out when I started clicking all over the task manager box out of frustration asking "Where are my buttons?!?!?!?!?!"...

Glad to see it got resolved...and Rick...your Avatar absolutely kills me every time I look at it...CLASSIC!!!

taskmanager wont show tabs

omg i have looked for week's for the answer for this one. ever where i looked said it was a virus. i ran alot of spyware and virus programs and show no virus. then i ran into this site and found the answer. all i had too do was double click on the side of the taskmanager...lol how hard was that. not only that but this is the only site with the right answer. thanks for all your help and post that i read. without joining up and you bet i did join up once i saw you guys do things the right way. thanks again and great website.

Thank you very much. I'm glad we could get you straightened out.
Also thanks for the compliments, it's always great to hear what we are doing here is appreciated.

:wave: Welcome to TechSpot :wave:
Hope to see you stick around and hopefully help others

I spent days looking for the solution to this. I feel stupid that the fix was this easy. I registered just to post this. This site is awesome!

No need to feel stupid, but thanks for the compliments again.

And I had the same problem too... weird... you'd think that microsoft would put in some instructions on how to get the menus and tabs back...

And why did it happen in the first place??? I guess there are some things one will never know....

APPLAUSE to rick!! i just read about this in my PC magazine... when i read it, i was laughing so hard. But it is true, many people know nothing of this little "feature." I played a prank once on a friend, and i hid everything, and he NEVER knew how it happened. I had to tell him before he reformatted his hard drive though...
rick, i salute you.

BlackGhost

how it happened with me

thefunkychook said:

And I had the same problem too... weird... you'd think that microsoft would put in some instructions on how to get the menus and tabs back...

And why did it happen in the first place??? I guess there are some things one will never know....

Click to expand...

I'm not sure about everyone else, but my taskbar issue happened with the doubleclick cookie.....lol

I wanted to move the window out of the way, and, well, bingo.

took awhile, glad I found this site.

$#@!$!%#@ Microsoft!

I'm a power user with 20+ years of PC experience and I've been running XP Pro on all of my systems for the last 3-4 years. After going through all of the usual motions that most everyone else who fell prey to this went through, I just posted a lengthy message on ElderGeek.com relating this problem and begging for help. I recently purchased two new laptops with clean installs of XP Home on them and apparently whoever configured the systems switched the taskbar to that mode which I had never seen before.

My hard drive light has been lit up solid quite frequently for no reasonable reason based on what I have installed and running (something I still have to track down but couldn't until now because I couldn't view and interact with my running processes!). That only fueled my fear that a virus had infected my system, and was affecting my task manager as a means of protecting itself (even though I'd ran multiple scans with multiple virus and spyware scanners searching for the culprit to no avail) . To make matters worse, while I have tons of experience with XP Pro and I know that there are very few practical differences between XP Pro and XP Home, I've barely touched XP Home until now so I couldn't be sure this issue wasn't somehow related to a difference betwen Pro and Home.

Thanks to whoever posted the rediculously simple solution to this problem. I wonder how many people have accidentally got their task manager into this mode or like me, purchased a new system with this default configuration, and spent hours searching their system for viruses or spyware, or have re-installed service packs or even the entire OS in an attempt to resolve this problem...?! Fortunately I didn't go nearly that far before I found the solution, but I was serioulsy considering upgrading my laptop to XP Pro in an attempt to fix it!

Rick said:

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.

Click to expand...

I'd like to say a big THANK YOU to you, sir.

I banged my head up against this for a few hours yesterday, to no avail, and this was after I was forced to reinstall Firefox, so I thought I had screwed up in a major way.

On another note, my login and password were not recognized by this site. Surprise! Neither was my Yahoo email address. Double surprise! I swear I registered and all that last year, but whatever.

I went through the whole signup process again. I felt I had to say thank you for giving me a hand with my Task Manager, which I cannot do without.

-- Craig

Hello!

I'd like to say THANK YOU as well! This was really bothering me, I thought something strange had happened to my windows, or I had disabled a service that was unknowingly causing the problem.

I'm so glad I ran into this page! I would still be hammering my head on the wall about it if I hadn't.

...

What a stupid feature! :grinthumb

--

p.s. I also just signed up solely for the purpose of saying thank you here, hahaha

One more Thank you !!!

Well. I was another dumb who has the same task manager problem and did everything what others were doing.... and by browsing the internet found the answer at your site..

So I browsed further and found that Techspot is an incredible site with a lot of knowledge.

And here I am.. as a registered user

Thanks to all of you !!!

I think everyone who has used windows xp has done this accidently and started freaking out. I remember last year, no wait its 2006, the year before last I ctrl+alt+deleted and I was like what the hmm. I swear to God I spent over 12 hours trying to fix it, updated all my antivirus and spyware programs. Did tons of scans. Nothing found. So I thought it was a problem with the taskmanager itself so I downloaded a new one to replace it, and it had the same problem. Then by accident I double clicked and woah, there it all was. So I double clicked again and it went away. I was so mad, why did microsoft go and do that. Jerks.

From what I see, it is meant to be able to stick in the corner of your screen for easy access to try and save yourself from all the XP mess ups (thats the nice way of putting it).

What happens if it says Task Manager has been disabled by the administrator instead? and nothing was done to change that personally....

Yep, I also just registered at TechSpot after reading this thread. Thanks
guys.

HELP - almost similar problem

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.

Rick said:

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.

Click to expand...

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