Many of you should be familiar with Windows Task Manager. Since Windows 98, the combination of Control+Alt+Delete key is the probably only thing to do when a program hung. You are presented with a “Close Program” window to terminate the application that is not responding or you can just hit the same combination again to soft reboot the computer. In NT based Windows, pressing the hotkey would directly invoke the Task Manager. The Task Manager is a program used to provide information about the processes and programs running on a computer, as well as the general status of the computer. It can also be used to terminate processes and programs, as well as change the processes’ priority.

As useful as it is, there’s a very weird feature built-in to the Windows Task Manager and it makes some users thinks that their Task Manager has an error or corrupted. The normal Windows Task Manager comes with a few tabs such as Applications, Processes, Performance, Networking, Users and it also has a menu bar such as File menu, Options ,View, Windows Shut Down and Help. If you’re not careful, you could end up with a Task Manager WITHOUT the tabs and menu bar.

So far I’ve seen this question being asked 3 times in forum by LunarWolf, yexist and gwa-53 reporting the same problem and I thought I should write an article to inform everyone that the Task Manager is not corrupted or caused by virus when you see such behavior.


Normally when you press the Alt key it should highlight/select the File menu which shows the menu bar. An example is the latest Windows Live Messenger 2009 which by default the menu bar is not shown and you can make the menu bar appear by pressing the Alt key. However, this won’t work in Windows Task Manager when the menu bar and tabs are missing.

To fix this problem, all you need to do is to double click at the edge of the Task Manager and the menubar with tabs will re-appear.

Yeap this is a really weird feature of the Task manager and I bet many users don’t even know about this. Not sure why Microsoft implemented this because I could never find a chance or any reason to use the compact version of Task Manager.