How To Lock The Windows Taskbar Permanently

In many cases when your computer is accessible to many other people, most of them newbies who fiddle around with the settings and layout and mess it up, you may want to disable certain features in order to minimise the damage caused by them.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to disable the locking or unlocking of the taskbar in Windows XP / Vista. By doing this, you can ensure that no one will be able to resize or reposition your taskbar and hence screw your desktop layout.

Procedure:

1. Right click on the taskbar and tick the option - Lock the Taskbar

2. Open the Windows Registry Editor by Start > Run > Regedit

3. Navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create a new DWORD value called LockTaskbar and set its value to 1 to lock the taskbar permanently.

4. Exit the Registry Editor for the changes to take effect.

Now if you try to unlock the taskbar by rightclicking the taskbar, you will see that the option has been grayed out.

To undo the changes, navigate to the same key mentioned above and reset the value of the LockTaskbar value to 0 or delete the value altogether.