Irritating Blank Taskbar Button

[DAVY MAC]

Is It Possible To Stop That Blank Taskbar Button Flashing Up From Time To Time? If Im Veiwing Any Video In A Media Player It Pops Up And Gets Mildly Annoying! Im On Xp Home Ed. Any Ideas Appreciated. Im New To Computers Try Not To Baffle Me?

[nanosani]

blank taskbar button ?? can you explain your question further ??

[DAVY MAC]

Basically A Taskbar Button Randomly Appears. It Is Blank And Does Not Have An Application. It Pops Up And Then Disappears In A Second But Like I Say If Your Watching A Video Or Whatever , The Presence Of The Button Causes The Taskbar To Show Itself On Top Of What Your Veiwing And Then Disappear. Ive Read That It Has Something To Do With Windows Calculating Whether An Application Running In The Back Ground Has An Eligable Window Or A Non Eligable Window, Eligable Meaning It Will Present Itself As A Taskbar Button?

[nanosani]

You mean that an application runs by itself automatically and then stops in a second ??

[Catweazle]

Hi Davy Mac. I'm unaware of any way you can stop that happening, and I've hardly ever seen it happen in Windows XP. I suspect it's older software you are using which makes it happen.

The reason is poorly written programs, basically. Programs work in complicated ways, and sometimes they open 'Windows' we don't need to see. (I'm sure everyone has at some stage een the border of a window flash up and then immediately disappear. There are 'hooks' into the Explorer shell which programmers can use to make a window visible or hidden, and to make a taskbar button appear or not. The blank taskbar buttons usually appear because a programmer has changed a window to taskbar-ineligible while it is still visible. The windows need to be set to hidden before taskbar eligibility is changed.

Solution: Use a better written program :)

Edit: Could you please stop capitalising the first letter of every word? You're making my eyes bleed!

[JoEbY-X]

I had this problem. I would see a blank taskbar button appear shortly after start-up, then every 15 minutes or so after that. I discovered it was being caused by hpcmpmgr.exe, a management file for HP devices. (My wife, with her impeccable memory, told me that the fleeting blank button began appearing after we bought a PhotoSmart 375.)

Perhaps the original poster can see if he has that file under "Processes" in the Windows Task Manager (hit CTRL-ALT-DEL). If so, run msconfig and disable this program at start-up and see if this solves the problem. I talked with HP tech support about this and maybe some day they will fix the program. For now, things seem to run fine without it. In fact, here is a direct quote from an HP tech support guy on their on-line chat as I'm typing this:

"There won't be any problem disabling it. In fact some times it corrupts and behaves abnormally. We then suggest the customers to disable it from the startup."