Sounds like a question for the MSFN forums

True... haven't created a account there yet but have gone through 11+ pages searching there so far. Thought I'd ask here first.

I remember having those issues on some of my old pcs, I never bothered to inspect it further because it seems it does no harm to anything, and is not really annoying either. At least on one computer with Pentium 3 that behavior was there right from the beginning, without any updates installed.

Don't worry about this. Lots of stuff in Windows 98 fails to remove itself from the task bar until you click on the empty button they leave behind. It even happens in XP though far less often. When a program in Windows shuts down it has to close memory pages, release resources, and do all kinds of clean-up and if any of these aspects get delayed, they may get handled out of order by Windows' event handler and I believe this is what leads to these empty task bar buttons being left behind.

Gemini000 wrote:

Don't worry about this. Lots of stuff in Windows 98 fails to remove itself from the task bar until you click on the empty button they leave behind. It even happens in XP though far less often. When a program in Windows shuts down it has to close memory pages, release resources, and do all kinds of clean-up and if any of these aspects get delayed, they may get handled out of order by Windows' event handler and I believe this is what leads to these empty task bar buttons being left behind.

Not so much worried as much as want to know why and if it can be corrected. If there was never worry then nothing in the system would work right or how I want it to be 😉

I restored the original user.exe and user32.dll through SFC just a lil bit ago. The originals will make the screensaver work correct without the empty window. Quake 2 still not fixed (did not try HL yet). Also found some dated a year later with version 4.10.2227 on the cd. I tried those and issue comes back up with screen saver.

So file versions:
4.10.2222 (fixes screensaver)
4.10.2227 (breaks it)
4.10.2231 (breaks it)

I was hoping the problem would be associated with the games but at this point looks like programming errors in the applications call on how to close.

Does Quake 2 or HL give others empty windows on win95/98/ME?

So, still no proper solution for these empty buttons? =)

This article tries to explain the reason of the issue. But I can't understand why the default screensavers leave these buttons. The application is already closed, so why explorer can't detect that process of the window does not exist and hide this button?