Taskbar, Quick Launch icons & a white block!

Hi folks.

I am really hoping that you can help resolve a problem that is driving me mad!

The problem is that the Quick Launch icons on my Taskbar frequently take several seconds to appear and whilst they are 'loading' a simply get a white block on the Taskbar (see image). During this delay (3 - 5 seconds) waiting for the Quick Launch icons to appear Windows is pretty unresponsive.

I am using Windows XP SP2, on a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. The laptop is running a 2.2 GHz dual core processor and 4GB of RAM so processing power and memory shouldn't be the cause.

I have a Quick Launch toolbar on my Taskbar. I have my Taskbar set to auto-hide. And the Taskbar is effectively double height (so that I have my Quick Launch icons visible on the top row and open windows / applications on the bottom row).

Please see the screen shot image for an example of what I am describing:
http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff126/photo_guy_01/Taskbar-QuickLaunchIcons.jpg

(My Desktop is set to have no image and be plain white, btw!)

Any thoughts, solutions, suggestions or feedback to get the Quick Launch toolbar displaying correctly would be VERY much appreciated!

(Obviously, I am able to remove the Quick Launch toolbar in order to solve this problem; however I would rather not have to do that).

Many thanks.