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Friday, 27 February 2009

Internet Explorer links bar moves, won’t stay in one place?






Does your links bar in Internet Explorer 7 annoyingly change position when you open a new tab (or if you switch away from that window, then back again) – it just won’t stay in its original position, even though you’ve locked the toolbars?

Here’s a tip for one possible solution to the "disappearing Links Bar" problem. It works fine on my Windows Vista machine (though it’s not guaranteed to be permanent - I’ve had to do this twice now over several months).

  1. Best close all existing Internet Explorer windows first.

  2. Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools, and then click Internet Explorer (No Add-ons):


  3. This opens up a new special IE window.

  4. In that window, unlock the toolbars if necessary, so that you can move them, by making sure "Lock the Toolbars" is UNticked (if it's ticked, just select that option to untick it). Do this through the File menu if you have one visible:


    - or if not then use the Tools icon:

  5. Then move the Links bar to where you want it by dragging and dropping.

  6. When you finish, lock the toolbars again (i.e. follow step 4 above to make sure that "Lock the Toolbars" is ticked again).

  7. If the Links bar was already in the right place in this window, well try just unlocking and locking the toolbars!

  8. Then close that Internet Explorer window.

  9. Hopefully new IE7 windows that you open from then on (though not existing ones that you didn’t close yet) will now show the Links bar in the right position. Until it disappears on you again, in which case rinse and repeat…!

If you’re having to do the above several times, then probably the best troubleshooting step you can take to stop your Links bar from continually vanishing is to find the add on responsible for the issue (normally it’s the fault of an addon and not Microsoft, I think!) and then disable it permanently, unless the usefulness of that add-on to you outweighs the annoyance factor of the disappearing Links bar, of course (here’s how to disable add-ons).

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