I have a feeling I'm not the first to have experienced this, so forgive me if you've heard this before.

My problem is that as of this afternoon, I can no longer undock the input panel. Selecting "Undock" has one discernable effect: the panel disappears. The only way to make the panel appear is to hit the icon in the task bar. This brings the panel up in its previous position.

I've had the computer three days. Up until this afternoon, the panel was always undocked (I never changed the setting). The input panel icon would appear whenever I tapped in an input area. The icon stopped appearing this afternoon, forcing me to use the icon in the task bar for the first time. At this point, I discovered a docked input panel, one which I can no longer undock.

The system is XP SP2.

I guess it may be germaine to the discussion that today I installed Timbuktu Pro on my system. I have a hypothesis about what may have happened, though I can't come up with a solution. I hope maybe there are some experts out there that can enlighten me and anyone else who may have experienced this problem.

Thanks for listening!

I'll be darned--the problem went away. However, I suspect it's a real problem and not just my imagination.

First I did a system restore to the point before I installed Timbuktu. That didn't fix the problem, though it messed up some stuff I had configured today. I undid the system restore and everything was fine, except the input panel was still misbehaving.

I gave up on getting this fixed today and went about other things. Later on, I started up a program I hadn't run today, and the input panel icon reappeared. Now it is there reliably.

If I start the panel using the icon in the task bar, it still comes up docked to the top or bottom of the screen, and the "Undock" menu item has no effect except to make the panel disappear. However, tapping on the floating icon results in the panel appearing nearby--the behavior is what I had grown used to.

I've exported the current registry settings (both HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER) for SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TableTip. If the problem reoccurs, I'll compare the current settings to the saved settings. If I discover anything interesting, I'll post it here for others who may have similar experiences.

Regards.

The problem ebbs and flows. Thebad functionality appeared for a while today and later corrected itself. I didn't install any software today, so that's not the problem.Also, the REG entries are no different when the problem occurs than when it doesn't.

Now it's w0rking. Let's hope it continues to do so.

I've had the same problem on my Gateway CX2620. I managed to figure out that the ATI Hydravision utility that I had installed caused the issue. After I uninstalled it the problem when away.

The corollary to this is that screen tools like window blinds, etc that hook into the display API may be culprits to this phenomena. Just a semi-informed guess at this stage though.