taskbar expander confusion

[Carol Spears]

hello,

thank you for your work and how easy my desktop is to work with and how
nice it looks.

recently something appeared in the taskbar or at least my eye picked it
up.  it might be my theme misbehaving or i might have the idea wrong but
the taskbar is now showing some expanders in the upper-right corners of
the entries there.  

my project, gimp, gets these suckers every once in a while as well.  i
tend to blame it on a clash between usability experts and beautifier
experts.

when i first saw these expander things in the task bar, my first idea
was that i would be able to use different sizes in the taskbar for the
different tasks that appear there -- which would have been useful to me.
i think they are being used to tell that there is more than one task
being represented there.  the little symbol though looks like a mouse
should be able to grab it and resize it though.

here are some screenshots:
http://carol.gimp.org/files/screenshot-2005-10-12-4x-expander.png for an
enlarged view of what i am try to explain here.
http://carol.gimp.org/files/screenshot-2005-10-12.png
my apologies to xfterm developers and xfmedia player.  the xfterm has
been difficult for me to migrate to and xfmedia player came broken
broken broken from debian.

thanks again for the desktop that me and debian and the developers who
made me use debian can agree on.

carol