using an old flat screen monitor ...I am encountering heretofore strange behaviour

NOT the fault of the monitor

when I minimize a window, it does not show up in a stack above the icon in the lower panel

as in ALL previous KDE desktops I've had

When I hit some unknown key or click on some unknown icon, I see all the minimized windows

lurking out of sight.

Any idea of how to get the minimized windows properly stacked on top the icon in the panel
kde 4.10.1
Linux localhost.localdomain 3.8.3-203.fc18.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Mar 18 12:59:28 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

In the same network I have another computer same Fedora and KDE and the icons do appear on top the icon in the panel
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some improvement when I reduced the size of the icons in the panel

This is probably caused by the settings of the "Task Manager" applet.
If you right click on it > Task Manager Settings, does unchecking some or all of the "Filters" on the "General" tab help?

reducing the height of the panel and hence height of icons works

Unusual. If this has fixed the issue for you, it would be appreciated if you could mark it as solved.

the matter should be researched a little further.

I can usually work around anything!

Here is a similar post from fedoraforum.org

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=168721

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=168721

I'm not sure why this happens, however it could be due to layout problems in the applet.
To test this, could you try checking force row settings, and setting the number of rows to 1?

how does one set rows to 17

as I stated, the proplem only occurs on an old monitor with limited resolution

The number of rows is controlled by the "Maximum rows" setting, and should be set in this case to '1'.
It can be found at (Right Click on Task Manager Applet) > Task Manager Settings > General.

my other Fedora box with identical KDE now has strangely acting icons

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=289932

obviously these effects came with a recent yum update

Hm. Can you provide a screen shot of your panel please?
I suspect you are using an icon based task manager rather than the usual task manager applet...

bottom line:

before this "new" KDE now showing on both my Fedora 18s

the display was PERFECT and logical and great

a screenshot would be unlikely due to the fact that the "ghost" icons of minimized

windows are extremely faint and the "ghost" icons slide around and even disappear

sometimes. The "ghost" icons show such tiny text I cannot tell which minimized window is which

The snapshot program when started makes the box of "ghost" icons disappear.

I'll try my digital camera in 30 minutes

Okay. Even a screenshot of the applet itself without the effect shown would be helpful as it would allow me to identify the type of task manager applet in use.

have the screenshots, looked all over for the place to attach the screenshots

I had similar issue after upgrading to 4.10, applications opened in previous sessions ended up on another activity which was not listed in activities list...
I've resolved that by purging activities settings (I don't use them anyway).

Screenshots need to be uploaded to an external image host, such as Imagebin, Imageshack, etc.

@Emdek: that is a rather concerning bug. If you reproduce that bug again, please open a topic here so we can investigate the cause and get a bug report filed.