Vista - Taskbar Auto-hide No Longer Works

I've recently got this problem where my taskbar will no longer stay hidden. Once I boot up it will auto-hide for a short time then it just stops working as if my mouse is always hoovering over the taskbar. I can then disable and then re-enable the feature and it will then hide until I put my mouse over it and then it will no longer hide. The only new thing that was done before this happened was installing Vipre Antivirus software. I've tried disabling that to see if that was the problem but it still remains. Does nayone have any ideas what would cause this and more importantly how to fix it? Thanks for any help you can give!

Hi,

I haven't used Vipre, but you seem to think there may be a bug in it causing this problem.

Probably need to uninstall it rather than just turning it off and see if that solves it.

If not, I would try a System Restore to a point before you had the problem.

System Restore - How to

You may like to post the Vipre website to alert to them to this suspected problem.

I assume you had it on a free trial period.

If you would like to try a different antivirus/malware app., the free Avast Home Edition is very compatible with Vista and well liked by many members of this Forum.

FREE antivirus software for Windows with anti-spyware - avast! Home Edition

Hope that helps

SIW2

Thanks for your reply! No, I don't think there is something specific related to Vipre, it was the only thing that had changed by me directly (not counting updates) that was new before this issue popped up so I disabled it to see if that was it and it wasn't, unless I need to completely remove it but I haven't gotten to that stage yet. So I'll probably do as you suggest and remove it completely to see if that changes anything. I'll simply make a restore point and then uninstall it as opposed to your idea of going to a point before it was installed just in case something else happened at about the same time that is causing this. Trying to be systemactic about troubleshooting this one...

Thanks for the Avast suggestion, but I actually switched from that to this paid version only because of the amount of resources it uses are much less from what I've read/experienced so I thought I'd give it a shot and I do like it so far. But if I find this is related to Vipre I have no problem switching back to Avast on this computer as I will still use Vipre on my other two XP boxes.

I use Avira anti-virus and have 4 systems in 'almost' identical configs. Same software, both games and applications, etc. All Vista 64 Business

This problem has arose on only one machine. Whats most annoying about it is things like browsers seem to treat the taskbar as actually hidden and therefore (taskbars are on right of screen) there is a column obscured which usually includes the primary menu header (i.e. file).

Definitely irritating and as yet have found no definite cause or solution.

I've been away on business the past few days so have only now gotten to try and trouble shoot this issue further and it is definitely related to the Vipre antivirus software I use. Deactivating the "active protection" did nothing but once I fully uninstalled it my taskbar is back to normal. So I think I'll shoot them an email complaining about this "feature" of their software and go back to using Avast as it never caused this issue at all. Thanks for your reply and I hope you find a solution for your machine that does this as it is very annoying to say the least.

Just got a reply form the makers of Vipre and they sent me a link to a new version of the program. I've downloaded it and it appears to have fixed the problem! Thanks again to those that have responded.