So the taskbar replacement floats (see the pic) fairly often when I restart my computer. Most times it will go away after a few minutes, but tonight it is being stubbornly persistent. It doesn't affect usability, although I have to go to the actual bottom of the screen to get it to pop up (it and the taskbar are on auto-hide). Every once in a while I can open the Windows taskbar settings and it will go away, but again not tonight. Windows 11, Winstep 26.1 (although it did it on the previous version too). Am I missing a setting?

Windows 11 is a mess. That might be the Windows taskbar that decided to randomly reset the "auto-hide" setting by itself (it has already happened here several times too) but because it is still hidden/invisible it just appears as a "gap" below the NextSTART taskbar.

Previously the Winstep application was able to programmatically set the state of the taskbar (so it would automatically set it to auto-hide when NextSTART was running and reset it back to whatever it was on exit) but Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom (not!), later changed this and now it is no longer possible, so the user has to manually set it to auto-hide to prevent it from reserving screen space at the bottom.

Otherwise try opening NextSTART Preferences and press Ok, see if the NextSTART taskbar falls into place.

Thanks! I'll give that a shot next time. I already re-booted and it fixed itself.