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23 Responses for "Fix Windows Tooltips Showing Behind Taskbar"

1. samad909 December 8th, 2007 at 6:05 pm 1

   There is a simpler way to do this without installing anything,

   Click properties in the taskbar, uncheck keep the taskbar on top of other windows, click apply, then recheck it and click ok and wola!

2. Raymond December 8th, 2007 at 6:13 pm 2

   samad909, I tried that before writing this article and it didn’t work. That’s why I did not write it in.

3. HitMe WithIt December 9th, 2007 at 1:01 am 3

   Great!
   Thank you so much for bringing this little fix to my attention. I have been irritated by this thing since I started with Windows version whatever all those years ago and cannot believe it still happens on XP SP2 Pro!!!
   Finally I can fix it.
   Great site, keep it up

4. James Craft December 9th, 2007 at 1:44 am 4

   All i do is pick one of the apps in the tray, find it in the start menu, right click it, and choose “sort by name”. Fixed.

5. In-f3ts December 9th, 2007 at 11:59 pm 5

   Nice try, but that doesn’t work either. Only the fix can help… Thx Ray

6. mory December 13th, 2007 at 2:31 am 6

   Download NeoSmart Tool use huge ram
   15-20 MB of ram!!! just for fixing a tooltip problem?!!

7. jinosuke December 14th, 2007 at 7:29 pm 7

   my method is stop the explorer.exe running from the task manager then run it again.

8. bud December 27th, 2007 at 9:59 pm 8

   I did another workaround I read somewhere. Click the Turn Off Computer button, then cancel it (don’t actually turn it off or restart) and the tooltips should work properly again. If your taskbar is not set to auto-hide you might have to check autohide, apply, then uncheck it. Mine is set on autohide so it worked immediately for me.

9. dasda January 17th, 2008 at 2:45 pm 9

   thanks, this was driving me crazy.

10. Keep It Simple Sweety January 31st, 2008 at 2:01 pm 10

    SIMPLEST SOLUTION

    Click Start, Run
    In the Open text box type: tskill explorer

    Explorer will stop and restart. Problem solved. No need to run any software.

11. Randy February 9th, 2008 at 1:41 pm 11

    Thanks so much! This has driven me crazy for a long time!

    I already use AutoHotkey so I wanted to incorporate the source.
    I found the source here:
    http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/731320.html

    I like the idea of having it “fix” itself periodically.
    Even once every several minutes should be sufficient.
    Thanks for the ideas!

12. KISS is awesome April 23rd, 2008 at 4:42 am 12

    K.I.S.S’ solution is a decent work-around. It worked for me where nothing else did.

    I’m not interested in having to hunt down my taskbar, and I need tooltips to know battery use on my laptop.

    Thanks!

13. fakeName May 5th, 2008 at 8:33 am 13

    better yet…

    create a batch file that you can have on your quicklaunch bar.

    tTip.bat contents:
    tskill explorer

14. Fixed May 12th, 2008 at 12:18 am 14

    James Craft’s solution posted above works for me.

    Thanks James!

15. Chris June 25th, 2008 at 6:27 am 15

    I\’ve found that if you task kill explorer and then it restarts itself not all icons will return to the system tray but the apps still remain running. So that does mess things up just like forcefully task killing any other process. Anyway tooltipfix.exe worked for me! Great program.

16. freddyzdead August 13th, 2009 at 10:36 am 16

    Killing explorer and restarting it is a very inelegant shotgun solution. You might have had a dozen windows open and you would have to start them all up again.

    The ToolTipFix utility works well and doesn’t hog any memory.

    This is one of many bugs that have been plaguing the windows gui ever since windows 95. It is just staggering that this gluttinous company could allow these things to persevere even up to now, while ripping hundreds of dollars per windows licence off the planet’s population.

17. Patrick August 21st, 2009 at 11:53 pm 17

    Thanks man! You rock! This was very helpful. This bug has pissed me off for 12 or more years and I’ve never bothered to look for a fix.

    PS: Asking for a URI to find out someone’s website is like asking someone their address without requiring their City, State or ZIP code. While the URI can include the URL, the URL is more specific while asking the URI can be interpreted as any fragment of the URL such as the “/blah” in “example.com/blah” whereas a URL implies the use of the protocol, the domain (authority), the port (if required) and the URN (the part after the domain:port).

18. Patrick August 21st, 2009 at 11:55 pm 18

    PSS: I was wrong on the URN – I used to think that part was the URI, but the URI is more of a general term I think. However, the term “URI” applied to “/blah” in “example.com/blah” isn’t incorrect, I don’t know what it’s specifically called…… this is a hell of a tangent.

19. bob September 16th, 2009 at 1:57 am 19

    I just right-clicked on the taskbar and chose “lock the taskbar” and that fixed it, for whatever stupid reason.

20. abajan September 18th, 2009 at 7:21 am 20

    samad909’s solution does indeed work on my computer, Raymond. I went a bit further, though.

    I right-clicked on the taskbar, chose “Properties”, unchecked “Keep the taskbar on top of other windows” and clicked the “Okay” button. Then I went back into the taskbar properties, put the check mark back next to “Keep the taskbar on top of other windows” and clicked the “Okay” button.

    Now the tooltips are displaying as they should and the taskbar still displays on top of other windows.

    I’m running Windows XP Professional SP2.

    There’s really no need (at least in my case) for the overkill of an extra utility. Thanks for the info, though.

21. Jonkers October 4th, 2009 at 4:56 pm 21

    Thanks for compiling these solutions here.

    Here is yet another fix, written by Jerold Schulman for an article that appeared in Windows IT Pro magazine and also in SQLServer magazine, May 12, 2006:
    http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=85856

    It is a batch file named FixTTbTB.bat that you run from a command line prompt with a F or U switch. The syntax is: FixTTbTB F|U
    (Where F fixes the problem, and U undoes the fix.)

    (** I have copied the contents of the batch file at the end of this message.)

    The batch file sets the value of registry key
    HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask
    to either 90320780 (“fix”)
    or 9E3E0780 (“undo”)

    This fix appears to work, by changing the values of the first two hex words 90 32 to 9E 3E. (I cannot find documentation for the values of this registry key, so I don’t know exactly what the 9E and 3E do — maybe someone here can answer this?).

    **NOTE** — The value of 9E3E0780 for “Undo” is the default value of the key on a fresh Windows XP installation..

    However, before running this batch file, you might want to check the current value of the key in your system:
    I just noticed that the value of this key, on several of my XP computers which have been in use for awhile, differs from the Microsoft default, so the key has apparently been changed by other things that I have run on my systems. E.G., here are the values of the key in three of my computers:
    be3e0780,
    be3e0580,
    9c120380.

    So you might want to check your current key value and use that as the “Undo” value in the batch file instead of the Microsoft default one.

    ** FixTTbTB.bat contents:
    —————————————————–
    @echo off
    setlocal
    if {%1}=={} goto err
    set key=”HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop”
    set switch=%1
    set switch=%switch:”=%
    if /i “%switch%” EQU “F” goto fix
    if /i “%switch%” EQU “U” goto undo
    :err
    @echo Syntax: FixTTbTB F^|U
    :end
    endlocal
    goto :EOF
    :fix
    REG ADD %key% /V UserPreferencesMask /T REG_BINARY /F /D 90320780
    goto end
    :undo
    REG ADD %key% /V UserPreferencesMask /T REG_BINARY /F /D 9E3E0780
    goto end
    —————————————————–

22. Just Upgrade December 31st, 2009 at 9:16 am 22

    It seems that Microsoft finally corrected this problem with Service Pack 3 on XP – I had this problem with SP2 but now it seems to have vanished.

    If you have SP2 you can reproduce this problem by going to Start Menu->Programs->going to any item and right-clicking to “properties”. Your tooltips would then appear behind the systray. Upgrade to SP3 and no longer happens.

23. Ben January 8th, 2010 at 1:20 pm 23

    I have SP3, and also have this problem so it does not seem to have been (necessarily) fixed in SP3.

    I googled UserPreferencesMask to try and find out what the registry fix does… Microsoft’s Technet contains an article on it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957204.aspx however from this article it seems like the values changed are “reserved for future use,” leading me to believe that changing them either should have no effect, or that Technet is misinformed.

    I went ahead and made the change, then end-task’d Explorer, restarted it, confirmed the problem was fixed (it was), then attempted to create the problem again by the method given in other comments here – right-clicking a program in the start menu – and lo: it has not manifested itself. I’m a skeptic by nature, however, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I noticed the error again several hours from now