it's definitely not "most recently used windows come first" (or if it is, its definition of "recently used" is not straightforward), since if I have 4 windows, one in each corner, and I click each one in order, it doesn't go in that order no matter how many times I iterate over it.

however, I certainly understand the difficulty that would arise from trying to implement it yourself. Actually I had forgotten that was a Windows feature you were just hooking into.

yeah seems to have been a fluke/"reboot skeleton". I should have known...

still, I do wonder how you can end up unable to find the taskbar? It's not as though Explorer wasn't running, right?

Fair enough, though given my disability, a workaround like you described might prove to be impractical for me, at least. I'll see what I can do, but thanks for responding quickly at least. Honestly, part of the reason I let it go this long is because it's so minor, so I'm relatively indifferent to it. I really just wanted to let you know so you can fix it if you wanted to :-)

yeah a restart fixed it, but I have at least one hypothesis... if I can just reproduce the circumstances required by said hypothesis, well, that's always the trick right? One thing I noticed after my restart is that one of my OneDrive accounts is having an issue merging a file, something that might be related to the reason I had to restart explorer (the aforementioned issue with auto-refresh)... and thus in turn might™ be related to this issue.
Then again, if it's hard to reproduce, I sometimes wonder if it's even worth the effort to try, so long as it doesn't cause problems for anyone else. I'll poke around for a little bit while working on my college essay tomorrow (this all happened while I was trying to use Microsoft Word 365 + OneDrive for that), but failing that, this is probably going to be one of those "can't fix" situations

side note, do you do anything with Explorer  that might cause auto-refresh to break? I've been noticing an issue lately where, if I modify a folder such as by creating a new document, I have to right click and refresh for the new item to appear. Same with deleting. Just wondering if you might know whether that's you or one of the other Explorer extensions I have (like classic shell/classic start menu), though it has no bearing on this issue.