right-click a blank area of the taskbar, Properties, click to "Hide Inactive Icons" if it is not enabled, Customize, then scroll down the lists of icons you do not want and set each to "Always Hide" Apply
Many of the programs that appear there have an option for turning themselves off
For example the Catalyst Drivers for the Radeon 9700 load a little ATI symbol inthe task tray on startup, going tothe Control Panel for ATI I can unselect the option that says "Display on taskbar", thus removing the ATI symbol from the task bar.
Most programs that display themselves in the taskbar will have an option somewhere to not display themselves in the task bar. As to where that is is up each program, you could try right clicking on the icon, that may bring up a pop-up menu that has the choice, or load the program up and go to its Configuration/Preferances/Options screen and have look.
Just forcing XP not to display the icon doesn't stop the program from residing in memory consuming resources
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There is no magic, only onions
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Wel as bcastner mentioned, i did it works but when i relog or restart computer all icons are still there, whil i login as admin account. its xp home, at my home computer. I dont want to disable/hide all icons.
jfryer, yes some icons have this option and i turned off but other icons or programes do not have any option like this.
If you want to run programs that force their icons into the tray, you're going to see the icons. You can either (a) stop the program from loading at startup, which would be my choice, or (b) do what bcastner said above (set to Always Hide), or (c) live with it.
I hate how some software manufacturers think they're stroking their ego by putting junk all over the place when their program is running, but if you want to use a certain program, you live with it.
Thanks for your reply, actulay i just want just few important icons, while i want to remove all others, you know the problem is even i hide them, but when i reboot or relogin these all icons come again.... why its happening....? I realy hate the way like this too, manufactrers forced their rules.
From what I've seen, when I set icons to Always Hide, they may appear for a bit right after I start up, but after awhile they do get hidden (unless there's activity in that program, then they stay visible.)
The whole tray area that Microsoft now calls officially the "notification area" of the taskbar is quite frankly a mess.
It is very poorly documented, and MS itself often gets it wrong: every have your Volume icon disappear? Have you see what happens to other icons if the Internet Gateway icon is enabled?
I resorted to a little utility called SysTrayX by xdesksoftware just to manage the little guys and girls and animals down there.
But my gut feeling is that MS feels the notification area has been abused, and would prefer it to go away.
I see people wanting to get rid of Icons but what do you do when the icons intermitantly don't show on the notification bar? Example...
I fire the computer up and all my normal icons are there but more often I turn the computer on and I only get three icons, Network Icon, Norton AV, and IM icon. Any clues to avoid this or other users with same problem?? Also taskbar and TweakUI both work so long as I rebuild and reboot the computer but then reboot/restart the computer and I am back to 3 icons or all of them at any given time.
1. Next time you only have three icons, Ctrl-Alt-Del to run Task Manager, Processes, find Explorer. exe and stop it. Then File, New Process (Run) and type Explorer.exe. Does more than 3 icons appear?
2. Double left click the Network icon, do you see one picture of a computer or three?
Wow!!! Better then a reboot!! The first did the trick and all my cute little icons are back. As for the 2nd only one picture before and after the first test.
Final solution is likely a patch in Service Pack 2, I hope. As I mentioned above: "I resorted to a little utility called SysTrayX by xdesksoftware just to manage the little guys and girls and animals down there."
Hi there...same probs as dostani...intermittent loss of icons in the notification area. This is not desireable in my case. Used test provided by bcastner...reactivating "explorer.exe" works fine til the next boot. What is the fix please? Is this the result of the MS updates? My machine wasn't doing this when it shipped with XP Pro, SP1 only.
Thanks all.
One thing I did for a long time that worked well was to change the loading order of programs implementing tray icons.
Google for a program called "aspy32.zip", it is freeware and you should find it easily.
Unzip the program and run it. It will give you a listing, after you click to enable all the boxes on the left, of all of your startup programs.
Check the column "Despositions". You will see that each of your startup programs is being launched from different profile areas and run keys.
See where the icons that do appear before trickery are being run from. Double-click a few of the most important icons, and scroll the "Despositions" box to move the start location of these programs to the start area that appears to work.
Make sure you do a File, Save after making your edits. This will do the registry write.
Unfortunately you will not see the results of your handiwork until you reboot.
Eventually you will find that by adding one icon/startup program to the key your icons become scrambled. You have to play with this to see whether that program is better launched first or last in the sequence, by moving its launch/startup point by changing its "Desposition" and remembering always to do a File, Save to write your changes to the registry.
Here's a tougher issue. I am posting it here becase some of you may know the answer.
In a 2000/2003 Domain we need to turn on the clock for all users in a particular group. I though a registry script could do this but haven't found any place in the registry that holds this information.
Does anyone know how and where WIndows keeps the display status of the systray clock?
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