Bug of the moment 2008-02-10

I fear that some of the more recent entries have been a touch too serious and depressing, so here’s a silly bug: where’s my taskbar?

I’ve mentioned this bug before: when you ask Windows to miminise all windows, the taskbar randomly disappears too. I just guessed that the taskbar window was being minimised by mistake, but the bug is stranger than this.

If you begin dragging something and then hold the cursor over a blank area of the taskbar, all windows are minimised to give you access to the desktop. This is what I had done here, causing the taskbar to vanish. Notice that the item being dragged is partially obscured by an invisible window located where the taskbar is meant to be? For reference, the taskbar is on two rows at the top, like this:

I guess that the taskbar window tries to refresh itself, fails, and leaves itself completely undrawn? Who knows.

Note that the cursor in the screenshot is fake. If you press Print Screen, Windows captures the translucent window bearing the drag proxy image but ignores the cursor. If you use a screen capture tool such as IrfanView, ScreenGrab or XnView, and ask to have the cursor added, they draw in the regular arrow cursor instead of the real drag cursor, and omit the translucent window showing the item being dragged.

Why is it so unbelievably hard to take a screenshot with the cursor in? If I ask for a screenshot, I want a picture of what I see on the screen, not some lousy recreation that I have to repair afterwards.

So, I’ve updated my screenshots cursors page with the drag and drop copy and move cursors captured, again, from Virtual PC.

Update

This is what I thought normally happens: the taskbar disappears. I wonder what happened in the earlier screenshot?

Posted 10th February 2008 – Comments and questions?