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I have placed my Windows 7 (64-bit, if that matters) taskbar on the left-hand side, and dragged it to the desired width (typically wide enough to see 2 columns of small icons with text in the Desktop toolbar), and then locked it. But the next time I log in, it's gone back skinny on me. I have to unlock it, redrag it wide again every time.

How can I make it stay put? In XP it stayed wide for me just fine.

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Per MyDigitalLife, with the following registry trick, you can change or adjust the width or length of the buttons as they appear on the Windows 7 Taskbar, which will have the same effect as modifying the width of the taskbar.

1.Run Registry Editor (RegEdit).

2.Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

3.Right click on a blank space on the right pane, select New, then String Value. Name the new string value as MinWidth. Note: If “MinWidth” already exists, skip this step.

4.Double click on “MinWidth”, and change the value data according to the preferred size. By default, Windows 7 has the following MinWidth value (estimated), when MinWidth is not defined or not created: Button with standard or normal icons: 56 Button with small icons: 40

5.Restart the computer, or log off and log on again.

Note: The above change button width trick will only work when Taskbar is set to display “button”, which means it doesn’t work if Taskbar buttons’ behavior is set to “Always combine, hide labels”, where Windows 7 will always use its default size for icon-only button. To change the setting, follow these steps:

1.Right click on Taskbar, and select Properties.

2.Set the Taskbar buttons setting to Never combine (each window has its own icon, and icons span to more rows in Taskbar when there is too many of them), or Combine when taskbar is full (all icons of same application or program will collapse and stack to one when Taskbar no longer able to accommodate additional icon).

To revert and change back to default Taskbar button size of Windows 7, just delete the MinWidth registry value data.

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Thanks tons. That looks to have done the trick. I tried the 56 value first, but found the Desktop Toolbar icons too narrow for my liking, so I doubled it. 112 looks to be perfect. Thanks for the response. I had seen this technique other places, but hadn't thought of using it for this particular purpose. Glad you mentioned it. – user25160 Jan 22 '10 at 3:39
Well, now I have to take that back. I checked it a few hours later, and it was back to being skinny. I'm betting my issue is much like this one: superuser.com/questions/79001/…. – user25160 Jan 22 '10 at 12:41

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