Solved How To Make Windows 11 Taskbar Uncombined and Unlocked

Stigg said:

Maybe it's time to give 7+ Taskbar Tweaker away and move forward.
You cannot keep updating your operating system and hoping that it operates the same as the old one.

There comes a time for us all to move on, but there are some things in Windows 11 that stink badly.
Either stick with Windows 10 for now or suffer with Windows 11.

All my computers, apart from my one test computer will stay on Windows 10, because in my opinion, Windows 11 is a step backwards in functionality. It's an attempt to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, at experienced users expense.

Just some friendly advice.

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blacxarea said:

Here is my desktop now, after I installed StartIsBack++ version 2.9.15, the original Start Menu covered by the StartIsBack and moved to the left

View attachment 2871

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blacxarea said:

I've been tinkering Windows 11 since it's the very first leaked ISO, and like many others, I noticed the uncustomizable Taskbar. So I tried my own experiments to get some good things back to this newest Windows. I installed the latest build (22000.65) on my daily PC, that is actually "can't run Windows 11," because it's an old machine with AMD Phenom II X2 555 Processor. But I managed to do a clean install and most of the things run smoothly.

Now, for the taskbar, even if you changed "TaskbarGlomLevel" and "MMTaskbarGlomLevel" to 2, and changed "TaskbarSizeMove" to 1 in registry, the opened windows will always combine in Taskbar and the Taskbar itself can not be moved anywhere.

Now see this screenshot:
View attachment 2840

As we can see, I'm running Windows 11 Build 22000.65 with ungrouped Taskbar. This is my PC details:
View attachment 2841

How to do that? Here comes the most important thing:
- Copy "explorer.exe" from the previous build. Here I'm using one from Windows 10 Build 19041.964, can be seen here:
View attachment 2842

- Now restart the PC to DOS (Command Prompt)
- Get to the directory C:\Windows, and rename the original "explorer.exe" to something else for backup. I did something like this:
-- C:\Windows ren explorer.exe exploder.exe
- Copy the new "explorer.exe" to that directory. Here is what I did:
-- C:\Windows copy D:\Files\explorer.exe (D:\Files is where you put the copied "explorer.exe" from Windows 10)
- Restart the computer, and you now have the customizable Taskbar with uncombined icons and show text, also it's movable and sizable.

Finished? Not yet. I don't know will this one happens to others or not, but in my case, I don't have clock, network icon, and volume icon after replacing explorer.exe. To bring them back, you have to do this:
- Press Win + R (Run Command), and run this: shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}
View attachment 2843

It will bring the old systray icons dialog and you can choose which icon to show up at the bottom-right corner. Choose "Turn system icons on or off" to bring back volume, network, and clock icons.
View attachment 2844

Here is the final look of my desktop now:
View attachment 2845

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