Windows Tools, Help & Guides

A small annoyance in Windows 7 is the fact that it doesn’t remove old notification icons from the taskbar. After a while a lot of old icons will still be present with no obvious way to remove them.  This is easily remedied and this guide will show you how to do it, manually.

[UPDATE]-For those wishing for an automated solution, see here.

This guide does involve editing the registry, please see here before proceeding.

Before:

Step 1.

Press the WinKey+R, type in regedit and click OK

Step 2.

In the Registry Editor, in the left pane, navigate through to;

In the right pane, delete the keys;

IconStreams & PastIconStreams

Close the Registry Editor.

Step 4.

At this point, please save any work and cleanly close any open programs.

Press CTRL+Shift+ESC to summons the Task Manager.

Under the Processes tab, look in the Image Name column and find explorer.exe

Right click explorer.exe and click End Process Tree, confirm your action.

The Task manager may disappear and you’ll now be left with a blank screen.

Step 5.

If the Task Manager has also closed (it sometimes doesn’t) press CTRL+Shift+ESC again.  This time head to the top of the Task manager and click; File > New Task (Run…).  Type in explorer and hit OK.

Step 6.

Now Logoff and back in again or restart your machine, and you are done! :)

If you’re not keen on editing the registry, omit steps 1-3.  Download this zip file, extract the .reg file, double click it and allow the prompts.  Proceed through steps 4-6.

After:

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