A toolbar is already hidden on this side of your screen. You can have only one auto-hide toolbar per side

Question

I have tried to resolve this issue with Windows support but they have no solution so far and the months pass by... so I would like to try here and see if some smart member(s) on Superuser can help me out!

I have an Acer laptop with 1 TV and 2 external monitors connected. (4 screens in total, laptop internal, 2 external and TV). The TV is connected directly via the laptops HDMI and the 2 external monitors are connected via an USB hub with its own gfxcard.

I have the internal laptop monitor set to "Disconnect this display" while the others are connected. The internal display is only used when all other monitors are disconnected. So I use 3 screens, the 2 external monitors and the TV. Like in the image below:

These are not my screens, just a pic I found on the web to describe the setup.

ISSUE:

I get this popup with error message in Windows 10 every time I turn off or on the TV, I it have connected to my laptop via HDMI.

A toolbar is already hidden on this side of your screen. You can have only one auto-hide toolbar per side.

This is what happens:

When I either turn on or off the TV the other monitors flash and I hear the the blip-blop sound of disconnecting a device. Right after it happens the taskbar that I have set to Auto-Hide is suddenly popping up, is visible and does not hide again. This is irritating because I like taskbar to always Auto-hide. But most irritating, a warning sound and a popup appears with the error message:

A toolbar is already hidden on this side of your screen. You can have only one auto-hide toolbar per side.

My TV turns itself off after a while to save energy and PLOPP I get the fricking popup again. Often in the middle of doing something that gets interrupted until I click OK on the popup.

I have tried searching internet for a solution or for someone with same or even a similar problem, but incredibly I could not find anything at all related. The issue is extremely irritating because I turn on and off the TV several times every day. And each time I have to close the popup and then enter taskbar settings and change it back to auto-hide.

To make things even worse the popup with the error message is sometimes showing only on the turned off TV connection so that I have to turn on the TV again and click OK on the popup to be able to access the taskbar at all again.

I got a few replies from a guy at Microsoft with suggestions, but nothing that worked or was even close to work, you can read it here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-other_settings/a-toolbar-is-already-hidden-on-this-side-of-your/77239fea-635a-4fea-8c48-2128361303ec?messageId=ca5d7e4b-c274-4932-a236-4e2b3a927483

I would very much appreciate any help in this matter as it is slowly driving me crazy...

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

From the fact that your auto-hide taskbar is stuck on the screen, I would assume that a notification is displayed that needs to be dismissed.

But from the fact that you don't see this notification, I would assume that it is displayed where it cannot be seen. This might be because that it is positioned on an invisible or non-existent monitor.

The explanation for this might be that you had the wrong monitor set as active at the moment that you turned on or off the TV. Maybe the TV was the active monitor when it was turned off, or other situation which confused Windows.

You may test this theory by, when the problem occurs, start the Task Manager, kill explorer.exe, then in menu File > Run new task enter explorer.exe to restart desktop and taskbar. If the problem disappears with this manipulation, then my theory is correct.

You may also encapsulate this inside a .bat file:

@echo off
taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
explorer.exe