Vertical taskbar items

That's most probably Litestep or a samurize config.
You can put the Explorer taskbar on either side of your monitor, but for the most part, that never looks good.

Try experimenting with and learning Litestep and Samurize coding styles. A good way to do this is to take currently existing themes and read their source. Taking snippets from different themes is a good place to start as you begin to understand what each one does.

"aakio says:

jg. The taskbar is Litestep and you can disable the icons. And you're right, the windows that have no icons will end up with part op the caption text missing, but these are only few and not the ones i use most. Plus some can be fixed by adding extra space to it's caption text."