An item for a running program in the taskbar is usually [icon|text ......]. Is it possible to get rid of the text all so that there's only a really small item for each task left only showing the icon of the program? Like this: [Icon]. Similar to the new Windows 7 taskbar (only in how it looks, not in features).

If not, is it possible to define the max. size of the items in the taskbar?

I don't think the standard taskmanager can do that, but an option is to use an alternative taskmanager that can. My favorite is

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Sm ... ent=101586