Update on the delayed task icons and Photoshop entries

Ok, for the benefit of those reading this thread, communication moved to email as it was much faster to go back and forth that way.

there turned out to be two separate issues involved.

he first issue concerned Photoshop showing an individual task icon for each open project.

This is actually the correct behavior when task grouping is disabled. The Windows taskbar groups the Photoshop windows under a single button by default, which makes it appear as though Photoshop has only one taskbar entry. Hovering over that button, however, reveals the individual open Photoshop windows.

Since grouping was disabled in the Winstep task dock, those same windows should also appear as separate task icons there.

In other words, the actual bug was in v24.4, which failed to display the individual Photoshop document windows. The newer versions are correctly detecting them.

Photoshop also appears to manage the representation of its main parent window directly through the Windows taskbar API, which may explain the additional parent Photoshop icon in the Winstep dock.

The second issue was the much more important one: task icons taking approximately ten seconds to appear or disappear from a dock.

This turned out to have nothing to do with Windows shell notifications.

The Enable fast system tray refresh setting, which was originally used to display animated tray icons smoothly under Windows 10 and below, was enabled. Under Windows 11, Winstep uses its own replacement system tray, so the fast tray-refresh mode is not used (although the option is still there in case somebody is using Explorer Patcher or an older version of Windows). One part of the code correctly switched the dock update timer back to once per second, but another part still behaved as though the high-speed timer were active and only checked the tasklist every ten timer cycles.

The result was an exact delay of up to:

10 cycles × 1 second = 10 seconds

What initially threw me off was a miscommunication that led me to believe the same delay also occurred in the NextSTART taskbar. In reality, NextSTART was responding normally and the delay only affected the WorkShelf task dock.

That distinction was the key clue. Both applications rely on Windows shell notifications, so if NextSTART was updating immediately, the problem could not be a system-wide delay in those notifications. It had to be something specific to the dock’s own update cycle.

This also explains why the NextSTART taskbar responded normally while the WorkShelf task dock did not.

The bug has now been fixed for the next beta and is another perfect example of "you change something here and accidentally break something there".

In the meantime, anyone experiencing this issue can work around it by opening:

WorkShelf Preferences > Tray tab

and disabling:

Enable fast system tray refresh

That setting has no practical effect when using the Windows 11 replacement tray, so disabling it is safe.