Part way there...Step 1, done...

Thanks for the reply...

I fired up Process Explorer, and did what you said...but that, for me was a useless exercise... with about 50 dlls facing me, isolating the culprit would be too daunting.

I would think that you would need to know the prog that you used to activate specific dlls in order to ferret out those dlls to then deal with them. I indicated before that I did know what program was used. About 90% of them were MS dlls, so that did not help. The other 10% were for running progs. There were none that were associated with a non-running program. The few that were unassociated, and which I killed, had no effect.

While in Process Explorer, I mosied on up to explorer.exe and debugged it, off the right mouse toggle... To my surprise, that worked for session that I am on, but upon reboot, I am back where I started. I might add, that Dr. Watson briefly showed his face, but quickly disappeared without so much as a howdy doody...so where did the bug-log go? Now, this was a new discovery for me...so I think that I am half way there.

I would think that the next step would be to track down in the registry where explorer.exe hides, and hides its taskbar functionary buttons. There has to be a residual ghost lurking about somewhere to trigger the appearance of the button.

"debugging" cleans it off the active taskbar, but not completely out of the system shell commands, it appears...

Step 2 ???

1. Find the Dr. Watson bug log...
2. Find the other half of solution...wipe it from whichever memory bank it is hiding in, thus triggering the reactivation...

There might be more steps that I am not aware of yet...bummer