Tooltips Hidden Behind the Taskbar

There's a really annoying bug in multiple versions of Windows where sometimes the system tray tooltips and popup notifications will show up behind the taskbar, or behind other windows:

Tooltip hidden behind the taskbar

It's documented in Microsoft's Knowledge Base, but I find the proposed solutions a bit lacking:

To resolve this issue, use one of the following methods:

  • Log off and then log back on to the current account.
  • Restart your computer.

I'm constantly getting bitten by this bug, so I developed a little program to fix it. What it does is apply the style HWND_TOPMOST to all windows that have the class name tooltips_class32, solving the problem (temporarily):

SetTopmost PROC hWnd :HWND

    ; we just need to apply HWND_TOPMOST, the window procedure for the tooltip
    ; automatically sets the size, position, and visibility of the control
    INVOKE SetWindowPos, hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, SWP_NOMOVE OR SWP_NOSIZE OR SWP_NOACTIVATE

    ret

SetTopmost ENDP

Maybe I could modify it so that it runs in the background, sending a message every few minutes...

Well, for now this is what you have: tooltips.zip (source included, as always).

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