Minimize to Where??

Newbie who has used KDE in Mandrake 8 and RHL 9 trying to figure out peculiarities of SuSE 9. When I minimize something (browser, anything, by clicking on the minus sign), it doesn't drop a little box into the panel (taskbar) for me to go back to later. I don't know what the heck it does with it and can't find a way to fix this. Gotta be some simple setting to change that I'm missing. (???) Thanks for your help!