Way back in 1993 at the Microsoft Windows 95 PDC, we all got to see the taskbar for the first time. Sitting there playing with the latest and greatest from Microsoft, I asked one of the developers on the shell team if they were going to allow users to reorder the taskbar buttons. My thinking was that as you worked through the day you'd like to group various applications you were using together side by side on the bar. Also, by allowing the user to reorder the taskbar buttons of running applications you would always know where your applications were instead of having to read across a really busy list of truncated names. I was told they were thinking about it

Here we are fourteen years later and I'm still filing bugs with Microsoft that I can't set the order of the taskbar. Don't get me started on the horrifically annoying feature of grouping like applications; it's the first thing I turn off on a machine. Grouping all my Word or Visual Studio windows together is not how I work (or anyone else I know) I want to have the applications I'm using for a specific task side by side. It is far more natural for me to have the specific instance of the browser I'm using to look things up next to the Word document where I will use that information. Think about how many times you ALT+TAB between two applications and you'll see what I mean. Fortunately the window Z order doesn't follow the LIFO order of the taskbar.

Sadly, I think I will still be filing bugs about this missing feature in Windows 7.

Fortunately, some tools are available to fill the gap. Best of all, they are free.

The sexiest tool for reordering your taskbar is Taskbar Shuffle. You drag and drop the actual tabs around the taskbar like you would documents in Explorer. It's quite nice and has never crashed on me. Even better, Taskbar Shuffle lets you reorder the icons in the notification area by holding down the control key and dragging the icon to its new location. For completely obsessive types like me, Taskbar Shuffle is like scratching an itch. The only problem is that Taskbar Shuffle is written in Delphi so it only works on 32-bit OS versions.

When I'm on my Vista x64 machine I've been suffering, but no more. TaskKix, while missing a bit of the Taskbar Shuffle polish, does exactly what I need it to do and supports both 32 and 64-bit OS versions.

Both tools have been rock solid for me so I'm happy to recommend them. Make sure to donate to the developers.