Windows 7 minimized applications going blank

While Windows 7 seems to work better than I expected, this is the worst new feature ever imagined. They went to all this trouble to make minimized applications show up as active miniature images on the task bar, but then ones that haven't been used recently go inactive, basically they're pushed out of the cache, and their miniature images are no longer useful and it takes ages to wake the applications up again. Now I want my XP task bar back! Wahhhhh!

So far, I haven't found a solution to this. In fact, there seems to be only one complaint about it on the M$ forums. This one guy, Mike89, back in 2009, put up completely clear explanations of the problem. Nobody responded, or those that did were morons who didn't bother to read what he had written before firing off answers that didn't have anything to do with the problem. Amusingly, he now seems to be banned. Here's the thread:

http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-support/27872-taskbar-explorer-windows-going-blank.html

Oh wait, here's a clue: This makes the taskbar more XP-like!

http://www.techguideforum.com/how-do-i-minimize-windows-on-windows-7-like-i-used-to-do-on-vista/

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http:// Operation aborted.

It's the perfect storm of stupidity. First off, it serves me right for using an antique web browser. Secondly, who's doing this shitty HTML coding? Thirdly, why is there an option for turning on such horrible response behavior in IE and why must it be so mislabeled? I get this problem due to bad javascripting in the page, then the page blanks out and is replaced by this message. The workaround is to turn off the option for blanking the page off, by going to advanced options and unchecking "Show friendly HTTP error messages" box. The actual solution is to go and download the lastest overbloated copy of IE and reinstall it, introducing God knows what new problems. The complete write up is uncharacteristically on M$'s website here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917

using pdftk to apply a watermark

Sadly, it looks like PrimoPDF can't apply a watermark to conversions. A forum post indicated that there's a paid version that does watermarks, but the prices listed at the given links were boggling. Naturally, I thought of the power-packed pdftk, and yes it has that feature.

http://forums.primopdf.com/showthread.php?t=1788

However, the really interesting thing that I stumbled upon was the following post about problems with pdftk for this feature, and how this guy completely figured out what the bug was an how to work around it:

http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/pdf-watermarks-upside-down/