can I lock the task bar so the icons don't rearrange themselves?

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I”m using the latest update but this problem goes back to when I first updated to Win 10. I arrange my task bar icons in the order I want and I lock the taskbar. Some time later I look and the last few icons are in a different order. Once I found the bottom-most icon up as the second one in the list. This happens several times a week.

Is there a special setting for this?

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areader wrote:

I found the bottom-most icon

I take it from that comment that you have a vertical Taskbar, ie on left or right. I have the same, Taskbar on left, and have never experienced your problem. My Taskbar Settings:

I use small icons, no labels. I occasionally add, delete, and re-order the icons on my Taskbar, and the changes always hold.

Do you have any utility running which might interact with your Taskbar?

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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The only differences between your settings and mine are that I don’t use peek and I never combine buttons.

Three things running all the time, and they’ve never interfered before Win10–if they actually are interfering:

FooBar which is a very old  (1998) program that I use to store log in details and for reminders.

FreeCommander XE instead of Windows Explorer.

Logitech SetPoint

Other apps are on only when needed.

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[Bundaburra]

I’m not sure if you are talking about task bar icons or quick launch icons, but I had a similar problem with the quick launch, where icons would re-arrange themselves or disappear.  I solved it by taking a backup of the icons when they were as preferred, and restoring that backup if they went wrong.   In my case, the icons are stored at C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch, so the backup command, using good old XCOPY, is:

xcopy “C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\*.*”  “S:\Quick Launch Backup\”

The restore command is the opposite:

xcopy “S:\Quick Launch Backup\*.*”  “C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\”

I have these commands set up in batch files, so they are easy to run if needed.  Your icons may be held in a different location, and if so you would need to find them, but you may be able to do something similar.

 

Windows 10 Pro 64 bit 20H2

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Bundaburra.

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I’m not sure whether it’s Quick Launch or TaskBar, either. It comes preinstalled, with Windows Explorer and either IE or Edge on it, and you drag program icons to it rather than going through the process each time of finding the icon you want from the alphbetical list. I remember Quick Launch as something you had to add to earlier versions of Windows. In either case, I don’t lose icons, they just move around, so I put them back in the order I want (which happens to be frequency of use) when it happens. Your suggestion reads like overkill–although if I were losing icons, I’d definitely consider it.

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areader wrote:

I don’t use peek and I never combine buttons.

Try one, then the other a few days later. I doubt that’s it, but…

areader wrote:

Three things running all the time

I doubt it’s these, since they appear to have little to do with the Taskbar—I assume Foobar is the old audio player—but it’s easy to disable them for a few days.

I don’t have anything else to suggest, good luck

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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I will try disabling them, though, as you say, they have little to do with the taskbar. My FooBar is not an audio player; it’s a program that includes  several really basic utilities:  reminders, a notepad, a calendar (literally: keep track of the date, not appointments and things), a timer, and a password keeper. It basic, it’s small, and it’s all I need, so why go with fancier things?

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[BigBadSteve]

I believe user areader‘s problem is as follows, which has been misinterpreted in a post or two above. (Correct me if I’m wrong here, areader). The problem is that though icons are displayed correctly in the tray (rightmost portion of the taskbar), and the tray is in the place wanted on the screen, there is no way to control the left-to-right order of the icons appearing in the tray.

Icons might not appear in the same order in the tray even every time the system is freshly booted, since programs might have some variability in start times, and presumably the order of icons in the tray is based on what order the programs having those icons were started.

And when programs which display tray icons are started manually as well, the order of icons gets even more ‘random’.

Both areader and I want full control over the order of icons in the tray. We want to set the order they’ll appear in (left-to-right), and somehow save that so it’s done automatically.

This is an example of what we call a ‘Windows annoyance’. As far as I know there’s no way to fix it via Windows settings. Now, there might be a third party add-on program which will achieve what we want. If someone knows of one, please tell us!

I use the excellent freeware program 7+ Taskbar Tweaker to get round some other taskbar-related annoyances.
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

It works on Windows 10 as well as Windows 7, but will not solve the above issue. (For anyone who sees this and installs 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, do experiment with its settings or you could miss some really useful tweaks, and do install updates for it promptly, as updating Windows 10 can break it.)

Hoping someone knows of a program which will order tray icons the way we want them.

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by BigBadSteve.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by BigBadSteve.

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orry for the delay answering you. Yes, you are correct in describing my problem and what I want. I can only imagine that if it’s frustrating to me to have things move around on the taskbar, it must be [very difficult] for the blind!

I will try the Taskbar Tweaker and see if I like what it can do. Thanks for telling me about it.

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BigBadSteve wrote:

there is no way to control the left-to-right order of the icons appearing in the tray.

In Win 10 Pro, and, I think in Win 7 Pro before that, I could drag-and-drop tray icons into whatever order it pleased me.  Have I misunderstood your question?

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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[BigBadSteve]

ScotchJohn wrote:

In Win 10 Pro, and, I think in Win 7 Pro before that, I could drag-and-drop tray icons into whatever order it pleased me. Have I misunderstood your question?

User areader asked the question. But my comment above now stands partially corrected by you, thanks ScotchJohn.Yes, you can drag the tray icons to new locations in the tray. No, we don’t want to have to manually drag icons to reorder them after every boot or every program which displays a tray icon is started, especially if there’s some third party program which can remember our preferred sequence and be run on boot to automatically reorder tray icons the way we want.

For ‘general’ (non-tray non-pinned) taskbar icons, installing 7+ Taskbar Tweaker and having it run as a startup program will allow dragging and reordering them, and more! [see my post above for more]. I’ve attached a pic of the settings I use for 7+ Taskbar Tweaker.

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by BigBadSteve. Reason: Oops, screwed that up, much text was omitted, fixed now

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