I think I got XP at least a dozen years ago, and I think it was a year ago that I got XP Pro.

Never had this weirdness happen before. I believe my task bar mysteriously reappeared when I shut down Firefox and then reopened it again. That's the only thing I can think of as to how I got it back, but I can't figure out how I lost it to begin with. I did lose it while I was trying to log into PayPal and got a script error... script or plugin failed or something like that.

I'll chalk it up to creepy invisible gremlins playing with my 'puter and filtching my task bar just to be nasty and putting it back just when I was asking for help about it. Works for me.

That key is just oposite where my phone is, so I certainly might have bumped that key by mistake lunging for the phone.

I just really like my gremlins playing tricks on me theory.

If you put your cursor on the top edge of the task bar it will turn into a double ended vertical arrow. Drag downward and the task bar will collapse into the bottom of your screem, disappearing. It's not hard, actually, to do this by mistake.

When it is collapsed put your cursor on the bottom of your screen and you will get the same double ended vertical arrow. Drag it upward nad, voila, your task bar will be back.

I have no idea what I could have bumped by mistake, but I sure could have done something. Mysterious how it suddenly was back again when I'm sure I didn't do anything (that I know of) to make it come back.

I'm tellin' ya, it's those evil little gremlins messin' with the 'puter just to be nasty.

I am a (retired) computer programmer. I began back in the days when not only was every byte of memory valuqble, but every "bit" (one eighth of a byte) was too. I had a program in which the screen periodically and very unpredictably went blank for precisely eight seconds.

Eight seconds is ghastly. That is a godawful long time in computer world, even back then. Soemthing was terribly wrong, but I could not find it. The program worked perfectly, it was just this eight-second blank screen at unpredictable times. I gave the code to three other programmers, and they spent hours hunting the bug and they could not find it either.

Then one day I was working on something else. I was dealing with an "unsigned integer." This is a field in which you cannot have any fractional part, and which cannot be negative. The benefit of it being unsigned is that you can store larger numbers. The range of a signed integer is ?32,768 to 32,767, while the range of an unsigned integer is from 0 to 65,535. Whenever you use an unsigned integer, though, you must put into the program a filter to assure that user or calculated input which goes into that field is never negative.

So I was working on a different application and I went, "Whoops, I almost forgot to to put in the negative number trap." That started a train of thought, and I went back to the program that was blanking the screen for eight seconds. There was a place where I was telling the program to subtract the length og the user input from the length of the screen field and print that many spaces to blank out the unused portion of the field. The result was going into an unsigned integer and I was not testing to be sure it was positive. So if the user typed more characters than the field length the program was being told to print a negative number of spaces.

An unsigned integer "sees" a negative number as a very large positive number, so when told to print, say, -3 spaces the program was printing 32,764 spaces. Just for fun, I ran a test, and printing 32,764 spaces took precisely eight seconds. It took more than seven months to figure that out.

Effing computers. It isn't gremlins, though. They always do precisely what you tell them to do. You may not know you told them to do it, but...