Snover, when the taskbar disappears, does the desktop icons go away too? I'm trying to check whether Windows Explorer is dying or there is something wrong with the taskbar only.
By the way, have you seen this message on Computing.net? Something else I can think about: which version of IE do you have installed?

Regards,

Hi Snover
Are they running 98 Gold or SE? Also, do they have IE6 installed?
What other software do the computers have installed, and are they all the same spec?
It definitely sounds as though explorer is crashing out for some reason or the comp is hanging loading a startup prog or device.
You could also try booting to DOS, exporting the system.dat to text file and then import it back in. This will clear any registry corruption, but it would be one hell of a coincidence for that to happen on 5 separate computers!
Matthew

Maybe some new virus ? I believe yesterday a new win32 virus was discovered.

Deleting WIN.COM and doing a reinstall of Windows and reinstall of IE6SP1 fixed it on one without losing any of the settings or shit, another one was still hosed up too badly from something else and had to be reloaded. IIRC they were all running 98SE. I'll say again, it ain't a virus. The new one is a mailer trojan, nothing to do with explorer. And, AFAIK they both had IE6 on them previously.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?sci … &NoWebContent=1
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/taskbarplus!.htm
http://www.learninglinux.com/modules.php?name … article&sid=438
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter … greet.worm.html

You're at a shop now too, eh? 😉

#1 - Tried it
#2 - Maybe, but XP utility.
#3 - XP.
#4 - Vscan came up clean.

Yes, I am, which is why I'm much more bitter and hostile helping people here now. 😀

Nothing like giving support to the general public to make you question your sanity 😜
My favourite problem ever: Customer says that they've lost all they're work, turns out that someone had set the text colour to white 🤣

Nice. That's almost as good as the woman that called and talked at me for about 20 minutes about how she was going from Mac to PC and some computers rendered her word documents correctly and other ones didn't and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. I'm fairly certain that it was because some of the views were set to "Normal" and others were set to "Print Layout" ... but I never heard back from her. (Thank god.)