Yesterday my wife was playing poker (she does this every day). She wasn't visiting any sites where she hasn't been before - doing nothing strange. Suddenly the toolbar and start button were gone. I used task manager to close out everything but the toolbar and start were still gone. Had to reboot. If this should happen again is there a better way to get that stuff back without the drastic move of rebooting? It would also be nice if someone had some ideas about why this happened.

I don't know why it happens, but I had the very same thing happen to me just the other day. Bottom toobar and start button just disappeared. As a matter of fact, everything on the desktop was also gone! I held my finger in on the on-off switch to shut it down. When I re-booted, everything was fine.

If the taskbar is not locked, errant mouse clicks can resize it to nothing. There is also an option in taskbar properties for auto-hiding it. If her application crashed and it had resized the display, the display may not have been reset properly. If Explorer crashes, the taskbar goes away too, but it usually gets restarted automatically. Alt-tabbing and fast user switching while playing poorly written games can also have odd consequences. CTRL-ESC or Windows key is shortcut for start menu. If it disappears again see what happens when that is pressed.

If its just the errant mouse clicks: right click the bar and click lock taskbar

If it disapears for no reason: open task manager and close all processes called explorer.exe and the start menu will come up again automatically

Closing all "explorer.exe" processes in task manager will MAKE the taskbar etc disappear, because this process is the windows shell. Open task manager and make sure explorer is there, it has been known to stop running occasionally. If it is not running, go to File>new task and type in explorer.exe to bring the shell back.

Down to messages only four months old, so your getting more current, Summoner. Hehe.