Every once in a while the tooltips start showing up behind the taskbar so they can’t be seen. This is very annoying.

I found a fix that worked, but I’m surprised and a little dismayed that it fixes the problem. It’s like telling someone with a headache to jump around clucking like a chicken, but hey, whatever works.

The way to fix the problem (thanks to Kelly Theriot) is as follows:

I sorted by name once and checked the tooltips and they still weren’t visible, so I did it again and it worked. It remains a mystery why this has any affect on the tooltips being visible, especially having to do it twice.

Update: Thanks to several commentors for pointing out ToolTipFixer, a free utility (requires .NET) that solves the tool tip problem once and for all. Another solution is to use nircmd as follows:

nircmd win settopmost class "tooltips_class32" 1

To fix other Windows XP problems, click here.