Mysterious system tray tooltip bug

[gpvillamil]

The tooltips for icons in the system tray seem to come up behind the taskbar, which makes them somewhat useless.

Why is this? And how can I fix it?

[CarrerCrytharis]

I think this is a Windows problem, most of the time... it's happened occasionally on most Windows systems I've used. Is it happening constantly, or only some of the time?

[thibouille27]

Yeah, Windows problem. Happens to me as well, both on TP and main PC.

[Puppy]

It is common problem

[steveh]

GUI bug that goes back to Windows 95 days. Annoying, but never fixed (although I have not seen it yet in Vista).

Steve

[egb]

Pop under is a feature. It is available in XP and VISTA. UAC (User access control) is very good at pop-under messages. On XP, there are two options. The first is to kill "explorer" in task manager. That has the unpleasant side effect of losing some of the icons in the lower right hand task bar. You might also have to manually restart explorer. Do that from Task manager by pushing the "Applications" tab and the menu "File/New Task" and typing "explorer". The second option is to reboot. Rebooting clears the problem until it occurs again which seems to be at random times.

Ed

[nickacquaviva]

This problem is caused by a bug in Windows that causes the taskbar tool-tips to lose their "topmost" window style and be covered up by the taskbar. Microsoft has acknowledged this problem exists (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912650), but has not yet fixed it and probably will not.

Check out this web site for more information and a fix:
http://www.acquaviva.us/tooltipmanager

Tool Tip Manager was written specifically to fix this annoying problem by processing taskbar window messages and resetting the "topmost" window style for tool-tips as needed, automatically.

This program also allows you to customize the appearance of the task bar tool tips (font & color) and set the automatic hide timer value.

Regards,

Nick Acquaviva