My desktop look is empty so all I have is a nice wallpaper. My Windows taskbar has the "Taskbar Appearance" setting to "Auto-hide the taskbar". Although hidden, it leaves a thin top layer so you can still see it a bit, and where the pinned shortcuts are. Is it possible to totally have it hidden without a trace? This is a serious question. It really bugs m.
24 Answers
I found it.
It isn't quite what you are looking for. Hitting CtrlEsc will completely hide the taskbar. Hitting it again brings it back up. Mousing over it though won't bring it up.
It looks similar to this program, Taskbar Activate. This program is very old, but it hits your exact specifications. Completely hidden taskbar with mouseover support.
There is an occasional bug where the start button continues to show, but the taskbar is hidden.
Hope that helps.
0I know I'm really late here but this exact same thing was bugging me and having to hit a hotkey when I needed the taskbar got old fast so I finally wrote my own program to hide the taskbar. In case you still want or need it, here's a download link:
I should warn you that while its completely stable on both my systems, this is very new code so there may be some minor bugs in there. Mostly cosmetic stuff though, nothing to fear.
1Try solution proposed here (Aviassin Taskbar Eliminator).
2Here's another late reply:
I was annoyed by the 1px border and the loss of an entire screen edge, so I wrote some software to deal with this a while ago. You can find it here:
There's no installation necessary. Just run the executable.
This software doesn't support configurable mouse hot zones; once the taskbar is hidden, it can only be summoned again with the logo key or with ctrl-esc (or programmatically). This is intentional. Unlike Taskbar Eliminator, this doesn't require using a new non-standard keyboard shortcut to hide and display the taskbar.
