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.

I get those blank buttons also ever since installing the unofficial 98 package....

But I have another question about 98 taskbar.. I searched the bases and this is the best thread about it..

Has anyone figure out how to get that pesky line to go away next to the word start??

I notice Win95 does not have that line... (uugghh)

I have tried adding TASKBAR SIZE MOVE=0 in the reg but it doesnt work...

The blank buttons are due to a disconnect between the taskbar and window state. The taskbar doesn't poll the various windows for updates to see if they are still taskbar eligible or not. Clicking the buttons forces an update. Sometimes the taskbar doesn't get notified when an app exits, why exactly this happens internally I'm not sure. I've noticed fullscreen OpenGL applications more often have this problem but it can happen with others too (might be something wgl related). It can actually happen even if everything is cleaned up correctly and destroyed.

If you have access to the app source code or want to fix your own programs, it's pretty easy - you can do something like this before destroying a window:

1    ShowWindow(ctx->hwnd, SW_HIDE);
2
3    ex = GetWindowLong(ctx->hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE);
4    ex &= ~WS_EX_APPWINDOW;
5    ex |= WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW;
6    SetWindowLong(ctx->hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, ex);
7    SetWindowPos
8    (
9        hwnd,
10        NULL,
11        0, 0,
12        0, 0,
13        SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE | SWP_NOZORDER |
14        SWP_NOACTIVATE | SWP_FRAMECHANGED
15    );
16
17    ShowWindow(ctx->hwnd, SW_SHOW);
18
19   ... then destroy the window as you normally would ...

This forces a taskbar update before destroying the window, we hide it, change the style to one that isn't taskbar eligible, then show it again to force the update. It can still happen on Windows NT but seems very very rare in comparison. In general it is almost exclusively a Windows 9x problem.

A couple old KBs on this issue as well:
KB280722
KB214655

Dude111 wrote on 2025-12-07, 10:14:

I get those blank buttons also ever since installing the unofficial 98 package....

I've always had it on 98 with official patches. I have one 98FE install with an unofficial service pack (to make mass storage drivers stable) where the Quick Launch icons get replaced with the wrong icons after running for a while (maybe when something refreshes the taskbar). Even the little arrow next to desktop shortcuts gets replaced with a fragment of a random icon.