Disable Taskbar always on top (W2K)

[senius]

Hi.

I have found a way to disable the Taskbar 'always on top' feature.

It's a bit tricky, but here's what you've got to do.

1. Start regedit.
2. Find the key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\StuckRects2]
3. Double-click the 'Settings' property and change the value after the four FF's to 00 (disable) or 02 (enable).
4. The trick is now _NOT_ to reboot the computer via the normal MS way but to run the down.exe utility from http://www.losoft.de/download/ls-tools.zip with the /R /Q /F options.

(Disable)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\StuckRects2]
"Settings"=hex:28,00,00,00,ff,ff,ff,ff,00,00,00,00 ,03,00,00,00,3e,00,00,00,1e,00,00,00,fe,ff,ff,ff,e 4,02,00,00,02,04,00,00,02,03,00,00

(Enable)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\StuckRects2]
"Settings"=hex:28,00,00,00,ff,ff,ff,ff,02,00,00,00 ,03,00,00,00,3e,00,00,00,1e,00,00,00,fe,ff,ff,ff,e 4,02,00,00,02,04,00,00,02,03,00,00

If you wan't to hack Winnt, the key you have to alter is called

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\StuckRects]

Everything else is the same.

Hope you can use this little hack.
Enjoy,
Jacob

[Kevin.Brewer]

In the above post, Jacob Vandborg (senius) correctly describes the registry settings to enable or disable the Taskbar property "Always on top". This property is a member of the "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties" list. When this properties list is opened, the following checkboxes are shown:
Always on top
Auto hide
Show small icons in Start menu
Show clock
Use Personalized Menus

Jacob correctly says, in order to disable this property, to change the value after the four FF's from 02 (enabled) to 00 (disabled).

By experimentation, I've learned that the right hand nibble (four bits) of the 02 contains two other Taskbar and Start menu properties as shown below:

0010
| | | |
| | | +----- Auto hide (0 = disable, 1 = enable)
| | +------- Always on top (0 = disable, 1 = enable)
| +--------- Unknown
+----------- Show clock (0 = enable, 1 = disable)


Sincerely,

Kevin J. Brewer

[AnimekaHome]

That missing bit is in fact the "Show small icons in start menu" option.

Why on earth did MS have to hide these settings like this? And we can't even change them easily...

[keyser]

Do you know how to does this on XP

Ethier this method doesn't work on XP or im doing somthing wrong.

[james3mg]

Why do you call this "hidden" Right-click your taskbar, go to properties and the top set of checkboxes on the "taskbar" tab are these settings exactly...pretty easy to get to, and no extra shutdown utility

[dokteriq]

how do you set this using group policy?

[Loree]

This is a great hack! I'm not sure I understand why you have to do a hack to change these values, rather than having these options available in the task bar properties. It seems to be a rather ridiculous limitation if you ask me. Regardless, I am very grateful for this information, and am having fun playing around with it. Does anyone hear read the reviews on angie's list? I am looking to get some work done on my computer, but don't want to hand it over to just anyone, and was wondering if angies list would be a good place to find a good service shop. Thank you.

[olsen]

This really works! I was able to apply it. Are there anymore tricks? hehe