Docking Space / XP Taskbar Question

I have two questions that I need answered. I have an XP Taskbar which I have added to the docking manager so that it hides and then displays when the toolbar option is pressed. First, there is a lot of room in the docking area that is wasted. Is there a way to put a panel and other buttons in that docking area that are ALWAYS displayed, ie. they are not hidden like the Taskbar is. And the second question, is if there is some patch to the XP Taskbar/docking manager because the taskbar doesn't always hide when I move my mouse off of it. Sometimes it locks in place and I can't close it.

In case I wasn't clear enough, I was talking about the area along the left size of the window that gets created when you set the 'auto hide' ON. I wanted to add some buttons possibility inside a panel underneath the autohided menus.

Hi Zommick, I am sorry, but it is not possible to add any controls to the space left unoccupied within the autohide strip. Trying to implement this would involve extensive customization of the docking architecture and is not something that we would support. As for the autohidden XPTaskbar remaining visible when the mouse is moved off it, if this happens when the XPTaskbar has received the focus, then the behavior is normal and is the same as that exhibited by the VS.NET IDE. The control will revert to the hidden state when some other controls grabs focus or when the ESC key is pressed. To programmatically hide a locked autohidden windows, you may use the DockingManager.HideAutoHiddenControl() method. Prakash Syncfusion, Inc.