Problem With Windows 7 Icon List All my icons are now in a row in the taskbar

[mrdee 1]

First of all, forgive my ignorance for not knowing the right names for certain objects, but I will try to explain my problem as clearly as I can:I use Windows 7 Ultimate, and this morning when I started up my laptop, all my icons on the right hand side of the taskbar are now displayed in a row in the taskbar, rather than in that handy pop-up list (hope I am saying this correctly) they used to be in.I have tried right-clicking on the taskbar, but that does not make me any wiser as how to solve this problem, under "Toolbars" I do not see anything useful, when i click "New Toolbar", a window pops up promptimg me to load a file, when I click on "Properties", there is so much in the window that pops up that I don't know where to start, I have already Googled for "Windows 7 taskbar", but not found anything satisfactory...The reason I think why this has happened is (not sure whether that is the reason, but it is the only thing I can see that could have made changes to my system) is that, last night, I ran Ashampoo's "WinOptimiser version 6", I did not get to reboot my machine until I switched it off at night (wasn't prompted to do so), if I had rebooted, I might have seen it last night, but anyway, there was that row of icons staring me in the face when I started up my laptop this morning.Is there anyone who knows how I can get things back to the way they were, ie. having the icons pop up in a handy list when I click on an arrow?If anyone could adivise me on how to solve this problem, I would be extremely grateful.

[Iniyila 2]

First of all it is better to provide a screenshot in these cases but i will give you some solutions based on what i understood from the passage you have written, i think you are talking about "Show Hidden Icons" button which hides those icons which you have defined to prevent the taksbar from getting crowded , so if i'm right here is the solution for you:For getting it back to normal you should go into control panel , "Appearance and Personalization" then in "Taskbar and Start Menu" section you will see an option "Customize icons on the takbar" click on it (faster way type icons in the start menu and you will see customize icons on the taskbar there), now you will face a list each having 3 options , "Show icons and notification": this shows both icons and notifications of that icons (related software) and if you set all of the softwares to this option then you will not see any "Show hidden icons" button. (now in your case just see if the option in the bottom of the page saying "Always show all notifications and icons on the taskbar" is checked, then uncheck it and everything will be normal again, but if it is unchecked then you need to set all of the icons manually as you like), "Hide icons and notifications" : by choosing this option you will not see the icon as well as the notifications and in this case the icon will be placed on the popup menu which shows hidden icons. , "Only show notifications" : if you choose this for a software then the icon will be placed in the hidden popup but you will see the notifications related to that software like the antivirus update popup which shows that your antivirus has been updated.About the software you have installed i should say you don't need it and i suggest you to delete it before you find more damages to your operating system, as you said the thing happened to you is one of the results of installing that software, in most of the times win optimizers are just destroying the windows because they change a lot of things and they do not tell you anything about those changes, some times the changes they make in the registry makes windows so much unstable and sometimes you OS will die if you use them. if you are unhappy with the speed of your current operating system you can use many built in softwares which will not harm your windows, windows Degfragment is very helpful and you should do it sometimes for partitions which you have installed windows on it so the boot up time as well as starting applications time will be decreased a lot. another tool that windows gives you is disk cleanup which is very handy when your windows is very old, it deletes a lot of unused files and it makes your windows faster and remember that never disable your windows restore system because in the cases like what you have said you can easily restore system to a point before installing of the software and you can easily get your windows to normal conditions just like before, but anyway i don't suggest to use any windows optimizer because even the best of them like ccleaner is full of bugs that really can harm your operating system.And in the end i should say that sometimes such problems are not because any software installation, sometimes windows is deciding to changing its style without any reason (some type of bug i think), this happened to me a lot that even a system restore can not get it back to normal. one of this weird behaviors i have experienced is that the windows theme changed by itself and its like a ghost have changed it because there was not any software or virus related to that.