Vista: Windows Live Messenger: Cannot hide menu bar solution
by TheBlooger on Mar.18, 2007, under vista
Windows Live Messenger has an option to hide the menu bar for a more streamlined look. Recently, this option disappeared and i was stuck with a menu bar and no “hide menu bar” button.
In Windows Vista, this seems to be caused by Speech Recognition which enables the menu bar and hides the “hide menu bar” button. If you’ve enabled Speech Recognition to run on startup, try disabling it and see if that fixes it. Some users report mixed results where the problem randomly appears and disappears by itself. Closing Speech Recognition doesn’t seem to restore the functionality, while a reboot may just bring it back.
See this link for more details: http://www.msghelp.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=10
Update: In many cases, going through the following steps has restored functionality of the hidden menu:
- While you have Windows Live Messenger open , start Windows Speech Recognition (do not enable it however)
- Exit Windows Live Messenger (don’t simply sign out… close the program entirely)
- Exit Windows Speech Recognition
- Start Windows Live Messenger (you should now have the normal messenger window back, without the ugly menu frame around it).
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March 14th, 2008 on 8:26 am
Absolutely spot on. This is the only advice I found anywhere on the net that solved my problem. The other solutions one will find out there include modifying a registry key and turning the Accessibility Options magnifier on and off. These things only work in XP despite claims to the contrary. Speech Recognition was what was inferring for me and the suggested steps here worked first go.