New bar ? on the left of the desktop

My wife was running her computer, probably nudged a few keys and now has this problem. The same thing has happened to me, but I forgot how I repaired it.
Folder tasks, other places and details are the 3 boxes appearing on a large box looking a box like a taskbar which takes up about 1/4 of the screen space on the left hand side and it cannot be manipulated in any way.
The regular taskbar is fine, however on the desktop I cannot move icons around manually as they just slip back to where they were ! I have run Hijack this, avg and ad-aware and have not seen any infections.
She has XP Home Edition, with sp-2 and all updates except sp-3 which removed the agp driver. So I uninstalled sp-3 on it yesterday. It has run fine since.
Anyone with an idea.....thanx

Right click on the task bar on a blank bit, click on toolbars - uncheck everything but quick launch.

I could not right click on the bar..in fact I could do nothing.
I did find a solution on the internet at www.dougknox.com, it is called a common tasks repair tool. File is xp_rec_con.zip. It cleared it off the desktop after I ran it, logged off and back on. Thank you for your help. Alles van die beste...Daryl

That would be my next post if the easy fix didn't work. Doug does some very good stuff.