Could you upload a screenshot? You got me curious as to what blank buttons you're referring to 😜

Tetrium wrote:

Could you upload a screenshot? You got me curious as to what blank buttons you're referring to 😜

I'll try later this evening, I'm away from my Win98 PC atm. But if you google 'windows 98 blank taskbar button' you will see tons of hits from around 1999-2002 with people with this problem. It seemed a very common problem back then, and in my experience, I've seen it on multiple Win98SE installs on different hardware platforms. I figured it was common knowledge.

Here you go. See the blank taskbar button. This was left after I ran some timedemos in Quake II, then quit the game. It happens with other games too. When I quit the game, I get this phantom blank taskbar button. If you click it, it disappears.

I've seen these before but I forgot what exactly causes that to happen, usually get those when a program uncleanly exits.

It happens. It has always happened on my Windows 98 builds. Just click on them and they go away. Just don't leave too many of the "ghost" programs open or Explorer.exe will crash due to sucking up too much memory. There was an unofficial patch for Windows 98, but I found it to cause way too many problems than fixes. Just an old Win 98 quirk. Funny thing is, I found a video dating back to late 90s (99 to be exact) and one dating to 2001, and they both, for systems running Windows 98, showed the same issue. Guess it was just something you had to live with in the 90s/00s.

As soon as I saw the subject I knew what you were talking about.
Never bothered me that much, like you said click it and its gone. Don't remember office ever doing it? maybe IE, (back when it was my main OS) mostly games so bet its programs not quite closing correctly.

Yeah, if I do a bunch of Quake II benchmark runs in a row, then quit, I could have a dozen of these guys lined up down there. I've read, but haven't had a chance to test yet, that if you hit F5 (refresh) on the desktop, it will clear them all in one fell swoop.

Yep Quake II is the game that came to mind when reading the topic title - glad to know it isn't just my machine that does this!

Win95 gets them too and if I had a wild guess on what process opens them, it's ddhelp

You can make a game out of closing them all out as fast as possible, whack-a-mole style.