Mysterious disappearing windows

[lexie]

For about a week, my poor long-suffering puter (on XP) has taken to losing open windows from the bar at the bottom of the screen (I can't for the life of me remember the proper name of it!). This sometimes means that if the window it loses is covered by one of the other ones I have open I lose the window completely, if it's not covered I can get it back. It's getting a bit annoying. What have I done and can I stop it from doing this?!

[Gaffer]

Could it be they are being grouped..? there should be an arrow next to the window and then you can select the approprite one.

Claire

[lexie]

Nope, they're vanishing completely from the taskbar (I remembered what it's called!)

[BliarOut]

Tricky to say from the description, but for now press and hold <alt> and then tap the <tab> key and you will see a box that will scroll through each of your open windows in turn. It advances one window for each press of the <tab> key.

Just release both the keys when you find the window you want.

It's not easy to describe in laymans terms.

[lexie]

If it's any assistance to diagnosis, puter has a little think and the eggtimer comes up and it refuses to do anything for about a minute and then window vanishes.
I'll see if the alt tab thing works the next time it does it.

[chriswright]

Mine seems to do this occasionally, hitting the windows key usually fixes it for me