A bit of an odd one...since this morning, the quicklaunch bar has taken over the entire taskbar section (though the Start button and System Tray remain and work fine). I can still Alt-tab between applications. It seems as though the quicklaunch has been resized to far to the right, though there is no resizing bar there to rectify the situation (even when taskbar unlocked). I can use the left-hand side resize bar to drag the quicklaunch bar onto the desktop, thinking this would 'uncover' the taskbar, but instead the whole taskbar disappears completely, start button and all.

So, is there a way of recovering the standard taskbar element, or will it involve recreating the user profile?

You said the solution yourself - if no other solution is discovered:

1. Copy away all needed files from desktop/MyDocuments,etc. to some other partition.

2. Then create a new user account, and delete the old (taskbar-mangled) one.

Thought as much - thanks for the response