One of the cool new features of Windows 7 is the task bar. The clean appearance is mainly due to the lack of text describing each button or icon on that task bar.
If you have Vista, you can get that clean task bar look, with a simple registry modification.
Fire up RegEdit, and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
Create a new string value (REG_SZ) called MinWidth, and give it a value of 56.
Restart you computer, and you should have the clean, new Windows 7 look for your task bar.