Is Auto-Hiding THAT Hard?

For Blod's sake, why can't anyone make "auto-hide" work on task bars. It hasn't worked well on any version of Windows from '95 through Vista. The Downloads window in Firefox or IM notifications in MSN Messenger, as for-instances, will not allow the task bar to auto-hide properly - it'll just sit there, unhidden, waiting for you to figure out which window is trying to notify you of something or other that you don't care about.

I happen to like the task bar to be on the top of the screen, so when it doesn't auto-hide, I lose the tops of any windows up there which usually means I lose the ability to easily move them around and such. This happens to me every single day in Vista. Right now it's up there not auto-hiding and I have no idea which window is causing the problem, and whether it's just a matter of giving the offending window focus, or completely closing it to regain auto-hide functionality. I've got 3 SSH sessions via Putty, one instance of Word, three file explorer windows, one remote terminal, two Windows shells, one instance of FreeCommander, one instance of Notepad, one instance of Eclipse, an instance of Sage MAS90, 14 Firefox windows, and Outlook all running and I'll be damned if I'm going to start closing them all until the stupid Task Bar starts working right again.

This happens to me with Gnome panels also, but thankfully they do such a terrible job of "hiding" that I rarely use that feature when I'm running a Gnome desktop.