Reset the Notification Area in Windows 7 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.
This guide does involve editing the registry, please backup registry before proceeding.
Note: There is tutorials on this forum on how to backup your registryBefore:
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;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotifyIn 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.exeRight 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:
