Well, yesterday the task bar and start menu on my Windows dev box decided to crash. I’ve got my explorer set up to open new explorer windows in their own process, so I didn’t loose my opened windows and so loose my place in svn (as well as cvs and darcs). Ordinarily when this happens I just restart explorer and up comes my start menu. Not this time however. I put up with no start bar for the rest of the day as I was busy doing things and didn’t want to mess up my flow. It was an interesting experience. Everything seems to work quite happily without the task bar, however maximizing my windows didn’t use the area at the bottom of the screen reserved for the start menu. I started to find the empty space at the bottom of the screen quite distracting.
This morning after taking my daughter for a swim at the local pool I decided that I’d had enough. I did a bit of research on the net to see if there were some magical command line arguments needed to pass to get my task bar back. I suppose I could have just rebooted the machine, but I was trying to avoid that as much as possible. Finally I thought to myself, “Everything is checked in to their various repositories, so I might as well close down all my explorer windows and see what happens when I start explorer.exe”. I did this and hey presto up came my task bar 🙂 It looks like if explorer starts and it doesn’t see any instances of itself running then it becomes the start bar and desk top.
The more I use windows the more I miss my mac. I really need to get an intel mac so I can run ‘doze in a vm for those rare occasions I need to do something in Visual Studio .Net or some other windows only program.