Why is it that when one:

1) uses the NS Startbar to list tasks
and
2) Selects "show Captions on Tasks"

that the Button Metrics settings have little or no effect?

The width settting seems to have no effect at all. The height, only above 40 or so.

What gives?

When skinning the tasklist buttons for a theme with a Startbar, you should always set the width and height of the bitmap to 0. Yes, zero.

This allows NextSTART to stretch the bitmap at will on vertical taskbars, otherwise the tasklist's maximum width will be equal to the value specified in the width of the task button.

This is a legacy from the time NextSTART did not have a startbar and all task buttons were square.