It seems as though Windows 7′s taskbar auto-hide feature doesn’t work from time to time. Whether it be because:

  1. heavens, a new program was installed
    —or—
  2. blast! your computer has been on for a few hours

that still-clunky response to the OS X dock is, well, still clunky. To enable auto-hide to begin with:

  1. Right-click on the taskbar and select Properties
  2. In the Taskbar tab, uncheck “Lock the taskbar” and check “Auto-hide the taskbar”.
  3. press Apply/OK et voilà.

If no “et voilà”, here’s a quick fix that tends to fix any Microsoft OS GUI (at least they’re consistent)—but please, save all important working files before doing this (I am not responsible for your machine or data losses!):

  1. Run the task manager. You could do the old shortcut (alt+ctrl+del), or jump straight to it with ctrl+shift+esc.

    You get bonus nerd points for doing it with two fingers.

  2. Stop the explorer process! There may be multiple explorers running—order them by memory usage, and stop the largest one. Alternatively, just stop them all.
  3. With task manager open, go to File>New Task(Run…) and type: 
    C:\Windows\explorer.exe

    or, wherever your explorer executable is. Unless you’re a super dork and had a reason to move it, it should be here.

  4. Your taskbar should now work appropriately. If not, yell: “THANKS BILL” and shake your nerd-fist.