Shape window keeps growing downward (Visio 2003)

[Weeble]

I have my shape window floating. Every time I start Visio, it seems to
appear at the same size it was previously, and then immediately grow
downward. I *think* it's growing based on the number of stencils
currently inside it. Once it grows off the bottom of the screen I have
to resize it *and* reposition it, which is a bit of a pain. Is there
something I can do to stop it doing this, other than docking the
window? I like to keep it on a different monitor from the main window,
which is maximised, so I don't really want to dock it. (I should point
out that the growing behaviour still happens even if the shape window
and the main window are both on the primary monitor.)

 

[Paul Herber]

I have my shape window floating. Every time I start Visio, it seems to
appear at the same size it was previously, and then immediately grow
downward. I *think* it's growing based on the number of stencils
currently inside it. Once it grows off the bottom of the screen I have
to resize it *and* reposition it, which is a bit of a pain. Is there
something I can do to stop it doing this, other than docking the
window? I like to keep it on a different monitor from the main window,
which is maximised, so I don't really want to dock it. (I should point
out that the growing behaviour still happens even if the shape window
and the main window are both on the primary monitor.)

How many stencils are open in the window. I've just tried a large
number of stencils in a floating window and, yes, it becomes totally
unusable, the stencil headers take up all the space in the window and
the whole lot can disappear off the bottom of the screen.
It the stencils are docked along the bottom of the screen then you can
see them all very clearly. (I know that's not what you want!).

 

[Weeble]

How many stencils are open in the window. I've just tried a large
number of stencils in a floating window and, yes, it becomes totally
unusable, the stencil headers take up all the space in the window and
the whole lot can disappear off the bottom of the screen.
It the stencils are docked along the bottom of the screen then you can
see them all very clearly. (I know that's not what you want!).

It happens no matter how many stencils are in the window, but the more
there are, the faster it happens. For example, at the moment I have
three stencils open. There are three grey title bars at the top of the
window, one for each stencil. If I close Visio and re-open the same
document, the outline of the stencil window appears at the same size,
then before it's finished drawing itself, it grows downwards by the
height of the three grey title bars. If there are more stencils, it
will grow more.

I thought it might be a problem with XP Visual Styles, but I turned
them off and it still happened. I'll maybe try docking it at the
bottom of the screen, but I'm not sure that's a whole lot better than
docking it at the side. The annoying "search" box eats up a huge
amount of space, balancing out any gains from compressing the stencil
titles.

 

[Paul Herber]

The annoying "search" box eats up a huge
amount of space, balancing out any gains from compressing the stencil
titles.

Agreed 100%, it can be turned off though, but only temporarily. You'd
think though that there would be a Shape Search menu on either the
File -> Shapes menu or on the Shapes menu, no! Who designs this stuff?
In VBA something like
application.window.Windows.ItemFromID(visWinIDShapeSearch).Visible =
False
or is can be turned off from the menu in our utilities (below).