Windows tooltips will appear whenever you hover your mouse cursor over an item without actually clicking on it, and a small box pops up with information regarding the item being hovered over. A number of examples are the time and tray icons located down in the bottom right of the desktop which usually give you information, and also the quick launch icons or open windows on the Task bar which mostly just give you their name and maybe a description.

Over the years, a very common problem that a lot of people have faced is when they move the mouse pointer over any icons anywhere across the taskbar, and the tooltips are hidden behind the taskbar itself, not in front like they should be. This problem has been around since Windows 95 and can be quite annoying when there’s information you might want to actually read.

This is a well known bug that causes the taskbar tooltips to lose their “topmost” window status and be covered up by the taskbar. Microsoft acknowledged this tooltip problem existed back in 2006 but didn’t get around to doing anything about it until 2008 when XP Service Pack 3 came out. This cured most of the problems, but even today there are still reports of XP SP3, Vista and even Windows 7 users experiencing this issue from time to time.

Didn’t find what you want? The links below could help:

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