Hi all,

I'm new to Winstep and must say i'm completely loving it! Got a question though, i'm using the Atmospherica theme and when the Shelf is collapsed there's a small gap between the bottom of the Shelf and the Taskbar with the wallpaper showing through. Is there any way to close this gap so the shelf sits flush on top of the Taskbar or is this theme dependent?

Cheers.

I think it's likely a theme issue, which we need to get feedback to the Theme creator about.

I have "bleading unenvely7 across the bottom of the next step task bar and the bottom of the screen with this theme and no others. It starts about 1/2 way from left to right and gets mildly bigger as it gets all the way to the right side. Kind of tappered.

I don't notice what your talking about; because I have the WS shelf that normally sits over the taskbar on my other monitor located at the top and inverted.

But I haven't had time to send the author JCRabbit feedback about it yet.

cef100

A simple question with a complex answer:

The gap you see on the Atmospherica theme between the taskbar and the uncollapsed shelf is the shelf's bottom shadow. However, the gap you see when the Shelf is collapsed exists because the height of the NextSTART taskbar is less than the screen space reserved by the - invisible - Windows XP taskbar.

Although the NextSTART taskbar also reserves screen space so that maximized windows do not cover it, it cannot interfere with the area reserved by the *real* Windows taskbar (which is turned invisible by NextSTART when it first runs and replaced by NextSTART's taskbar). Because of this, it can only ADD to it, not decrement it, which creates the gap you see when the height of the NextSTART taskbar is smaller than the height of the native Windows taskbar.

You *should* be able to solve this problem by temporarilly disabling NextSTART task management (so the real Windows taskbar appears), grabbing the taskbar's edge and dragging it down, so only a thin line is visible, and then re-enabling NextSTART task management. I say 'should' because, at this point, you can't: unfortunately the new 'Hide unused systray icons' feature (always present in XP but only recently added to NextSTART) introduced a bug in which the systray icons disappear if the native Windows taskbar is not fully visible when NextSTART replaces it.

Until this bug is fixed, you can only solve the problem by

a) changing the theme settings so the NextSTART startbar is at least as high as the XP taskbar

b) increasing the height of the NextSTART taskbar so it displays two rows of tasklist buttons.

or

c) switching to Windows Classic mode in the Display Properties panel, because the classic Windows taskbar is smaller than the XP mode taskbar.

Hope this helps,

That's great! Thanks for your help guys, i'll fiddle around with it and see what happens.