ScrollViewer can only have 1 children, shown xaml is invalid. Without some screenshots it's kind of hard to imagine what you want. "If you want to see the bar you have to scroll all the way to the bottom first" - this is solved by using "floating" scrollbars, i.e. don't use horizontal scrollbar of ScrollViewer, but host additional one on the level of parent scrollviewer, so it will be always accessible, without need to scroll.