My screen being the size it is, I don't use auto-hide any more. I also remember on our really old computer (back when 1GB was huge, and we on top of that we had a 10GB drive
), I used to have auto-hide on, and I also sometimes switched between having the taskbar at the top or at the bottom (or sometimes when I messed about, having it as big as it would go so it took up more than half the screen).