[BuonRotto]

I leave it up most of the time, and hide it when I want the space by pressing command-option-d. I've grown quite comfortable with this arrangement.

I don't hide my Windows taskbar ever for a couple of reasons. For one, the behavior for bringing it up is annoying in my experience. It tends to have a hair trigger when you move the pointer down there, and stays up too long even after pulling your mouse far away. I've gotten into these frustrating patterns of bringing the cursor down, the taskbar popping up, pulling the mouse halfway up the screen until the taskbar hides again, going back down the screen, the taskbar pops up, repeat ad nauseum. XP is better in this regard, but I've gotten so frustrated with it previously, that I don't bother even at this point.

The other thing about the Taskbar that makes hiding it more problemmatic is that it is a lot more vital to my workflow than anything in the Dock. The mixed environment on Windows -- some apps use parent-child windows which are always maximized on my computer; some don't; some look like they do until you open more than one, then they don't -- makes the taskbar more important for navigating than the Dock. On my Mac, I can either drag and drop among open windows since I never have maximized windows that block everything below, or I use Expose when something is occluded.

slight tangent: I've never really gotten into the copy-paste pattern that Windows users use so frequently even though I use Windows everyday. If I did work that way more, I would probably need the taskbar else than I do now. I've seen a lot of Windows users try to do everything copy-paste on a Mac, and don't usually consider drag and drop. It's still a hit or miss thing on Windows mainly in terms of how it behaves. It's not that it isn't fairly pervasive, just that it means different things in different situations.

That's not knocking the Dock. I'd rather have a more simplified Dock or set of Docks (stilll love the tabbed Dock of OpenStep 4.2 beta) to use for shortcuts than to burden it with more functionality and a Finder/Spotlight-like role. The taskbar is going in the other direction of course, and there is merit to the idea of a small persistent area that is a central control center for the user, aka something akin to the Start menu. But their apparent similarity I think contributes to user frustration more than it helps in a transition from one to the other. (Mind you, the Dock came first from NeXT, and Microsoft took ideas from the Apple menu and the NeXTstep Dock to come up with the taskbar we know and *choke* love today.)

I wonder how many people work with the Dock or the Taskbar a certain way because they were more familiar with one to begin with, and they try to use the other in the same way.