I'm sure there are more than a few things that can do this (most notable being tclock2), but the problem I've always run into is that when you set the background color of certain items to transparent, then you can only select/activate them by clicking the text, because clicks on the background don't register.

If you're a sharpshooter with a mouse, then this is no big deal, but personally I find it near-excruciatingly irritating.

Honestly though, it's been forever since I've used a taskbar, so maybe this behavior has changed.

You can always use a program from Methodik called K-TaskMod. It does that and does not have to be running after it has set the transparency. It can be downloaded from http://methodik.pixelarmy.org/doku.php

Theres also TransTsk.

Unfortunately with all these apps, you lose some clickability as they all appear to work the same way, setting one color in the window class (in this case, the taskbar) to be transparent, or applying alpha transparency to the window class. I found with the latter, a window stops catching clicks after a certain amount of transparency has been applied.

Checking all of these out, thanks.

im guessing the click problem have something to do with how windows manages transparency. it seems to basicly shoot holes in the window so that if you hit exactly the right pixel your click will pass to whatever is below. increase the transparency and more holes are made, increaseing the chance that you hit a pixel that belongs to the stuff below. only way around this is to more or less apply a image of whats below as a skin to the window, not a clean solution.

hobgoblin, I was wondering about a workaround. Perhaps another way could be to catch clicks within a set of four coords and assign the onclick function to that? I'm not sure if thats possible.

if you're using a visual style in xp, you can use taskbar transparent.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=251243

dont know serenity, i have never coded much windows, but in theory it sounds workable...

hmm, dreamz, know of a fast way to change the bakground color of win2k taskbar buttons? tclock2 can do that to start button and systray but cant with the taskbar buttons

still, a very interesting effect presented there

As far as I know, windows only supports making one color transparent to obtain the see-though effect. Its either that or applying alpha transparency to the whole window class, which isn't what we want. I've tried applying multiple instances of the "this color = transparent color" to the taskbar class to hopefully catch the 3d dark/light colors as well as the background in 2k but windows only applies the last setting I send it, ignoring or overriding the previous commands.

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