Article ID: 281628 - Last Review: January 27, 2006 - Revision: 1.4

How to Change the Behavior of Taskbar Grouping

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SUMMARY

This article describes how to change the behavior of taskbar grouping in Microsoft Windows XP.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ ) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows

By default, when you enable the Group similar taskbar buttons option in Taskbar properties, items are grouped only when the taskbar buttons begin to get too small, and then the item that you opened first, is grouped first.

To change this behavior, create a "TaskbarGroupSize" DWORD entry in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

The values for this key are:

0 - (Default) Group by age (oldest group first)
1 - Group by size (largest group first)
2 - Group any group of size 2 or more
3 - Group any group of size 3 or more

Log off and then back on for this change to take effect.