Windows Task Manager Displays without Menu, Title Bar, Tabs, and Close Button

Provided by Molly Pell, Technical Project Manager

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I recently ended up with my Windows Task Manager in a state where it showed no menu bar, no tabs, and no close button. My menu bar was missing and the tabs disappeared! The right click mouse button did nothing!

This is all I had left:

Since I lost the menu and couldn't see any of the tabs for Applications, Processes, Services, Performance, Networking, or Users, I presumed the worst. Maybe Windows was corrupt or my hardware damaged.

Double Click the Border

As it turns out, the Windows Task Manager was running in “Tiny Footprint Mode.” Apparently, this is a feature, although the only benefit I found is that it allows you to resize the window to be very small.

The Task Manager switches to “Tiny Footprint Mode” when you double-click the gray area in the border around the tabs. You can switch back just as easily by double clicking the gray area around the outside of the frame. Not very intuitive but at least there's nothing wrong with Windows or my machine.

This issue is documented in this Microsoft Knowledgebase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/193050.

Return to the tips page