Look at that. You're right
That's not the problem though, I just wanted to make the letters smaller without making the desktop bigger. I tried changing control panel/display/settings/screen resolution on another XP pro machine today and it worked just fine. Now matter what size I made the font, I could always see all the task bar, from the Start button to the clock in the icon tray.
On my machine, if i make the font smaller, the task bar is about twice as wide as the screen. It's driving me nuts.