Nifty XP Freebie: Taskbar Shuffle

A few things are certain in life: That your car will break down immediately after the warranty expires, that Paris Hilton will be photographed partially naked once a month, and that Windows will populate the taskbar in the order you open your programs—and you won't be able to change it. While humanity works on a solution for the first two, someone has brilliantly figured out a way to fix the latter-most.

Taskbar Shuffle is a free and simple download that does one thing and does it well: It lets you drag taskbar items right or left, so you can rearrange the order if you always like outlook on one side and always like your browser on the other. Without Taskbar Shuffle, the only way to do this is to quit the applications and re-open them in the order you want them displayed along the bottom of your screen. Give it a spin if you've long wrestled with this pain of a "feature." It supports Windows from 95 all the way to XP.

One caveat: When I installed Taskbar Shuffle, my antivirus application (Trend Micro's PC-cillin on this machine) warned me that one of the temp files in use could be a virus. I am dead certain that this is not the case, so ignore any warnings you get during installation. I haven't tried it yet with other antivirus apps but expect you could see a similar problem with them.

Thanks, Lifehacker, for the tip!