Fix : ‘Lock the taskbar’ option is greyed out

We can change the the width of the taskbar by dragging the taskbar towards the other side of the desktop window. We can do this only if the taskbar is not in locked state. We can check or change the taskbar lock status by right clicking on the taskbar. Just clicking on ‘Lock the taskbar’ in the right click menu of taskbar will change the status from locked to unlocked and vice versa. But if you are seeing ‘Lock the taskbar‘ option greyed out as below then we won’t be able to lock or unlock the taskbar.

We can reenable the lock/unlock option by simply changing the data in a registry value. This registry value is called ‘LockTaskbar‘ and it’s present in the node HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer

Just open registry editor from Run window and traverse to the above mentioned node. Change the data in the LockTaskbar registry value to 0. Close the registry window. You can immediately see that ‘Lock the taskbar‘ is back to normal state.

Now you can unlock taskbar and then increase or decrease the size of the taskbar.