Solved Taskbar freezes in place, hiding bottom of apps

I have my taskbar set to automatically hide itself, which is important to my workflow. HOWEVER, after a few hours of work, the taskbar reappears and freezes in place, hiding the bottom of whatever window I'm working on: the Send button for emails, the worksheet tabs for Excel, etc. (All Windows programs would normally shrink to fit the smaller window as soon as the taskbar reappears, but they continue to fill the whole screen, as if the taskbar is not there, except that the taskbar is there and hides their lowest section.)

I've found that restarting Explorer always solves the problem immediately--the taskbar disappears, and when it reappears, the apps adjust to fit--so something in this component is freezing up. Any thoughts?

It is annoying to have to restart Explorer every few hours. And I really need the space the disappearing taskbar leaves. Incidentally, I tried upgrading from Home to Pro, just in case that would help; no go.

I "solved" this finally by scheduling periodic automatic restarts of Explorer, using the CMD line and bat file below. I ended up having to include two ways of restarting Explorer, as when I just used one way, it did not restart.

schtasks /create /tn "Guaranteed Explorer Restart" /tr "cmd /c start /b C:\Scripts\explorer_restart.bat" /sc minute /mo 10 /ru SYSTEM /f

and the bat file:

@echo off taskkill /f /im explorer.exe >nul 2>&1

:: Wait 2 seconds to ensure complete termination timeout /t 2 >nul

:: Restart Explorer using two different methods for redundancy start "" explorer.exe call "%windir%\explorer.exe"

tasklist | find "explorer.exe" >nul || ( echo Restart failed, trying final method... start "" "%windir%\explorer.exe" )

Obviously, this is not solving the underlying problem, but is a usable workaround.

hdmi said:

Taskbar auto-hide when maximized - Windhawk

Makes the taskbar auto-hide only when a window is maximized or intersects the taskbar

windhawk.net

Click to expand...

I'm trying this out, as well; if it works, I'll cancel the automatic restarts.

Side note: Windhawk alone doesn't keep Explorer going properly; I need the schedulic restarts.

HGNY said:

Side note: Windhawk alone doesn't keep Explorer going properly; I need the schedulic restarts.

Click to expand...

This is one of multiple reasons why I use ExplorerPatcher. It gives the option to effectively replace the default Windows 11 taskbar with a remake (for lack of a better word) of the Windows 10 taskbar. This option in ExplorerPatcher settings is under Taskbar > Taskbar style: "Windows 10 (ExplorerPatcher)".

The default Windows 11 taskbar has always had more problems than it, and no amount of tweaking/modding has helped me to change this basic fact. You won't hear me say that you can't polish a spaghetti, as Mythbusters already proved the opposite a very long time ago, but... you get the picture. So, I'll say this instead. Some people prefer to keep fighting windmills. Personally, I, prefer to accept basic fact. Because I am a pragmatist.

The bottom line is that even if it turns out that my above suggestion doesn't help to fix your problem, at least you'll know that much. For me, it's solved many problems, and not all of these problems were annoyances or minor quirks. Explorer multiple crashes was one of these problems.

Here is a car analogy. Microsoft replaced the steering wheel with a slice of cabbage, and, you don't need a vegetable shredder to watch it fall apart.

Hi,
I just tap the windows key twice, tap tap.
Sometimes the taskbar won't auto hide and this is my remedy.

Ciao, Han