I'd love to know how to resize a tabbed dock. anyone got the knowhow?

Also, i know for a fact that XP only Creates one set of System tray icons.  so you need to hide those first.
A possible fix would be to hide all the systray icons from your startmenu.    theres a simple registry hack to do this:
Put the next four lines in a notepad document, and save it as "anything.reg".  then run it, and reset.  If your startbar still doesn't work, and you want to reset this value back to normal, just change the last charicter to a 0.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoTrayItemsDisplay"=dword:00000001