You cannot drag an item onto a button on the Taskbar.

This must be one of the most annoying error messages in Windows. Not only did Microsoft put it there in the first place in the olde days of Windows 95, but it has stayed there, just to annoy me, through Win 95 OSR2, OSR2.5, Windows 98, and is still there in their latest "masterpiece", Windows 2000.

Why can't they just remove the error completely? Surely everyone knows about this by now! Or (this is a hard one) actually make dragging something onto the taskbar do something?

I used to think that this error was really fucking stupid, until I realised that there is in fact a valid reason for it.

If you drag an object onto a taskbar button, Windows has no way to know which part of the window you wanted it dragged onto.

Of course, that's no excuse for Microsoft's failure to explain why you can't drag something onto a taskbar button. Something in the help, or perhaps a hyperlink from the error message itself would have sufficed.

More sensible would be to provide a way for applications to specify a default drop target for this situation.

I still think Windows is really fucking stupid in lots of other ways.