Well, it turns out that I must have double-clicked accidentally on the exterior border of the Windows Task Manager (for instance on the red circle in the screen shot). What had happened to Task Manager in this installation of Microsoft Windows? I could see active processes or expand the scope to include other users. To my surprise, after logging back into it, the same behavior was experienced. I had no idea what happened, expected it was a memory probable of some sort, so rebooted the machine. And, inexplicably, I noticed that my task manager window was barren of both tabs and menus. I was working happily, remoted into a Win7 administrative machine which happened to have the VMware client installed upon it.
