Ho Teho, why yes you certainly could. And many people did, by accident and design.

It never worked quite as well on 4:3 monitors as you lost too much horizontal res and even on widescreen the lack of stacked icons and wider windows bars with labels made it less efficient, sometimes awkward looking. People did find good solutions in XP however using the vertical bar.

You can also add a quick launch type addition too, a bit like the one in XP. Place a folder on your desktop called Launch or something. Then copy or drag your desktop shortcuts inside. I drag mine as I don't like too many icons on the desktop.

Then right click on the taskbar and create a new toolbar. Select the Launch folder on your desktop in the requester and watch as all the icons appear, just like the old quick launch. You can remove text labels and make them small - plus they auto arrange into neat columns depending on the width of the taskbar. I'll add a picture here once I'm finished.