I was banging some keys on the keyboard...

…and I lost the entire menu bar at the top and the task bar at the bottom. They appear when I move the cursor to the top or bottom. What keys do I hit to reverse this? I have Vista.

To keep the task bar permanently in view: right click the task bar, select properties, unselect ‘auto hide task bar’ and click ‘keep the task bar on top of other windows’.

Vista (as far as I’m aware) doesn’t have a menu bar at the top by default. Did you have a program - like Internet Explorer or Firefox open, and was it that that lost its menu?

If you’re talking about in Internet Explorer specifically, you probably hit F11 for fullscreen. Press it again to go back to windowed mode.