did you try right clicking the icon and unpinning it? Otherwise it seems that you may have some kind of malware or spyware that came with the OS that is causing the issue. I would recommend a complete reinstall
if you right click and click unpin, the icon changes to a white peice of paper with the corner folded down (like an unknown filetype icon) until you right click it at which point it turns into the lambda symbol icon again. at this point if you right click, your options are the same as before except now "pin this program to the taskbar" is in the place of "unpin this program from the taskbar"
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That does look strange. Have you installed steam/cstrike? If so does it run properly?
yes steam and counterstrike are installed on my computer and they run without any problems. if counterstrike is running and i alt+esc to my desktop, there is two supposed instances of the program running.
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at this point, if i right click and select "close all windows," only the one that is an actual running program closes.
had this problem several times and it was always resolved by rebooting.
tried this just to be sure. didnt do any good :[.
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one more thing, if I open taskmanager, there is nothing listed under the process list that seems suspicious and I can terminate every process besides the few that have to be running and it is STILL in my taskbar.
It seems like there should be some other means of removing something from the taskbar (I really wish you could just drag the icons out onto the desktop or something!).
I really appreciate the help. If anyone has any more ideas please let me know.
edit:
today i have realized something that may be an important piece of information somehow if anyone has any idea how i can fix this issue...
i realized today that you can shortcut to the items in your taskbar by pressing the [windows key]+[{1,0}] where 1-0 correspond to the programs location in the taskbar. well, when i press it with 1 or 2 it opens the program corresponding to the appropriate icon position. however, if i press 3 ("steam: counterstrike" is in the the 3rd position) it skips it and opens up firefox (which is in reality in the 4th position) as if the 3rd link doesnt even exist. Note that it only does this when it is technically unpinned (as i mentioned above it can exist as both pinned and unpinned in the taskbar). If it is pinned at the time, it will infact launch counterstrike. Now why would it act as an invisible placeholder when it is unpinned???? because it doesnt exist in that state technically would be my guess. but if it doesnt exist, then why is it there. or better yet HOW??
Again, I realize this is a relatively minor issue, but it bugs the heck out of me and I really want to get rid of it! that being said, any input is GREATLY appreciated.