[Vertical Taskbar for Windows 11] Is there a way to prevent this annoying ui change that happens when taskbar overflows?

[sarasassa]

Is there a way to prevent this ui change that happens when taskbar overflows?

1769502873722393.mp4

Literally unusable. And the worst thing about it is that it doesn't return to normal after closing the last window that caused overflow

[m417z]

I don't think it's specific to the vertical taskbar. What happens with a horizontal taskbar in this case?

As a workaround, I believe that using the Disable grouping on the taskbar mod will make that behavior more bearable.

[sarasassa]

I don't think it's specific to the vertical taskbar.

Yeah the same thing happens even without vertical taskbar, just horizontally. I haven't used win 11 much, so I'm not sure about all the ways it's been crippled. Even now, I've only dared to touch it inside a virtual machine.

As a workaround, I believe that using the Disable grouping on the taskbar mod will make that behavior more bearable.

Thanks, that did help to make the situation a bit better. Although there's still this huge unused space down there for some reason.

Ideally I'd like it to handle the overflowing by implementing a vertical scroll instead (the way retrohub handles this) but alas...

[sarasassa]

Also, as far I understand win10-taskbar-on-win11 and win10-taskbar-on-win11-24h2 are not compatible with win11 25h2, right?

[sarasassa]

win10-taskbar-on-win11-24h2 should be compatible with 25h2

Alright, I uninstalled explorer patcher and tried it again and it seems to partially work. Taskbar looks different, I can place it vertically, so it works. But rlicking doesn't work. I.e it doesn't register any clicks with right mouse button on it, the context menu just doesn't show up

[Anixx]

Other people complained about this in 24h2 as well, but I tried in virtual machine and it worked for me, so there should be some cause that we don't know that breaks the menu.

[sarasassa]

Well, in my cause I also used a completely clean vmware win11 25h2 instance without anything else installed

[Anixx]

Try to enable the mod "non-immersive taskbar context menus".

[sarasassa]

non-immersive taskbar context menus

No luck. Even after the latest update

[raminmat]

Possibly useful data point from the ExplorerPatcher side of the fence, since the symptom described here ("doesn't return to normal after closing the last window that caused overflow") matches what I recently debugged on EP's Win10-style vertical taskbar:

There, the overflow state turned out to be sticky layout state, not missing buttons — on overflow the taskbar lays the extra buttons into real layout columns positioned exactly one taskbar-width off-screen, and after windows close it keeps the stale layout origin and never re-flows back. Two things proved useful and might transfer to diagnosing this mod's behavior:

1. Reading the actual button geometry via MSAA/IAccessible shows exactly where the "hidden" items went (they're usually laid out off-bounds, not removed).
2. Forcing any taskbar-settings re-read (for EP: flipping TaskbarGlomLevel + broadcasting WM_SETTINGCHANGE with lParam="TraySettings") triggers a full re-layout that un-sticks it without restarting Explorer.

Full write-up: valinet/ExplorerPatcher#3920 (comment) — and for EP users specifically I packaged the auto-recovery into a small free tool (https://github.com/raminmat/TaskbarGuard). Not directly a fix for this mod, but if the native taskbar's overflow state is similarly "layout that never reverts," a comparable re-layout trigger might be the workaround here too.