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Nexus Dock v24.4 Released!

April 28, 2024




The Winstep Nexus dock is a FREE dock for Windows. Every feature you’d expect from a dock, including widgets, mouse-over effects, skins, drag-and-drop, and many others not available in most other docks, such as live icon reflections, in-dock system tray, blur-behind effects, and much more. Completely customizable, with thousands of different backgrounds freely available online, Nexus is fully compatible with skins for all 3rd party docks.

Windows 10 Ready Nexus runs on the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.x, 10 and 11.

v24.4 is mainly a maintenance release, with some quality of life and stability improvements! New passwords can now be shown when setting up the Email Checker module, UWP Apps can now be launched as Admin and individually set to launch multiple sessions, etc... Please read complete change log below.
Winstep Nexus

Nexus Ultimate 24.4

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Thank you for your preference and for your help in making Nexus one of the best docks for Windows!


Important note to Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2 users:


Starting with Windows 11 22H2, and mostly for purely cosmetic reasons, Microsoft has begun making changes to tried and tested core functions of Windows that had previously been working fine for decades.

Windows 11 22H2 made many core changes to the Windows taskbar and systray. As a result systray icons can no longer be accessed directly by Winstep applications, and while v23.11 offers some temporary mitigations (giving you access to the main systray volume/network/etc panel and to the systray overflow area) this does require the user to disable the 'Always show all system tray icons' setting in the Winstep application - plus system tray icon customization with high resolution icons is currently no longer possible.

Microsoft also made changes to the mechanism used by Windows to reserve areas at the edges of the screen so toolbars (such as the Windows taskbar, docks, etc) are not overlapped by maximized windows. If you are using a Winstep application to replace the Windows taskbar, you must now MANUALLY set the Windows taskbar to auto-hide first in order to prevent conflicts (while previously the Winstep application would do this for you). A new 'Reset Reserved Screen Space' internal command has been added to help with the current unreliable behavior of reserved screen areas under Windows 11 22H2 onwards.

Despite numerous reports from Windows Insiders prior to the official release, 22H2 also breaks CPU usage reporting (total and per-process) at the API level. This affects 3rd party applications and even Windows Task Manager itself (CPU usage values reported in the Details tab are now meaningless). More than 1 year and a new release later (23H2), Microsoft still hasn't fixed this issue. Like other 3rd party software vendors, Winstep has thus been forced to work around this issue in order to report accurate CPU usage values (see below).



Nexus v24.4 complete change log:


  • Updated Spanish language file.
  • Updated Chinese (Simplified) language file.
  • The Windows 11 22H2 CPU usage mitigation settings will now only appear on the CPU Meter settings panel if running under the affected systems (Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2).
  • Added option to show password when typing a new password to the Email Checker module settings dialog.
  • Universal Apps can now also be set to 'Run As Administrator' in the Item Properties dialog.
  • 'Allow Multiple Instances' setting in the Item Properties dialog can now also be applied to Universal Apps. Allows launching multiple instances of the same application without having to press SHIFT or double-click even if 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' is active.
  • Added 3 additional fish types to choose from for Wanda.
  • Language names in the About tab now always list the English name first.
  • The Command Prompt (Admin) and Windows Power Shell (Admin) items in the context menu of the 'Start Menu' internal command were not launching those applications elevated.
  • UAC prompt no longer appears minimized in the taskbar when launching applications that require elevation from menus.
  • 'Media Mute' internal command introduced in v23.11 would change to an invalid 'CD Control' internal command upon restarting the application.
  • If the 'Combine dock icons with running applications' was enabled, it was possible for an icon on the dock to remain flashing for attention even after the associated application had already been closed.
  • The application could crash if a live thumbnail right click context menu got unexpectadly unloaded.
  • The URL used in the Weather module first time setup for IP to Country conversion was no longer working.


Nexus Ultimate v24.4 complete change log:


  • Updated Spanish language file.
  • Updated Chinese (Simplified) language file.
  • The Windows 11 22H2 CPU usage mitigation settings will now only appear on the CPU Meter settings panel if running under the affected systems (Windows 11 22H2 and 23H2).
  • Added option to show password when typing a new password to the Email Checker module settings dialog.
  • Universal Apps can now also be set to 'Run As Administrator' in the Item Properties dialog.
  • 'Allow Multiple Instances' setting in the Item Properties dialog can now also be applied to Universal Apps. Allows launching multiple instances of the same application without having to press SHIFT or double-click even if 'Do not launch multiple sessions of the same application' is active.
  • Added 3 additional fish types to choose from for Wanda.
  • Added another possible option to the License Key Troubleshooter, where a license key file exists in the proper folder but is for the wrong product.
  • Language names in the About tab now always list the English name first.
  • The Command Prompt (Admin) and Windows Power Shell (Admin) items in the context menu of the 'Start Menu' internal command were not launching those applications elevated.
  • UAC prompt no longer appears minimized in the taskbar when launching applications that require elevation from menus.
  • 'Media Mute' internal command introduced in v23.11 would change to an invalid 'CD Control' internal command upon restarting the application.
  • If the 'Combine dock icons with running applications' was enabled, it was possible for an icon on the dock to remain flashing for attention even after the associated application had already been closed.
  • The hide animation of a Grid Stack was stealing the focus from an application launched through it, which could cause full screen games launched from a Grid Stack to minimize to the taskbar immediately.
  • If the "Disable all animations" setting under the General Preferences tab was checked a Grid Stack would pop up without being sent to the foreground, which could cause it to appear behind other windows.
  • From Windows 8 onwards trying to rename a file using a name that already exists no longer resulted in a prompt asking the user if he wished to append (x) to the filename, the operation would fail with an error instead. The Winstep application now detects this situation itself, offers the actual prompt to add (x) to the target name and forces a rename collision if the user agrees.
  • The application could crash if a live thumbnail right click context menu got unexpectadly unloaded.
  • The URL used in the Weather module first time setup for IP to Country conversion was no longer working.

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