Version:           3.3.0 (using KDE KDE 3.3.2)
Installed from:    SuSE RPMs

Currently on a taskbar which is tall enough to have more than one row of tasks, tasks appear to be organized vertically (top to bottom) then only horizontally (left to right).

It would be much better if tasks could be organized horizontally first, then only vertically. I would suggest this to be default, for backward compatibility with existing wetware you may wish to have an option to select the old behaviour.

With the current behaviour if you close a task, ALL taskbar tasks to its right will move to _different_ rows. In my opinion this is bad design.

Whereas in the proposed behaviour (as in Windows ;) ), only the leftmost and rightmost tasks will change their row positions. The "horizontal first" behaviour would result in fewer tasks changing their relative positions - especially since that vertical taskbars are only allowed one column of tasks. Also tasks tend to be resized horizontally and never vertically.