How to clear the list of “Notification Area Icons” in Windows 7?

Question

I can't seem to find a way to clear the list of "Notification Area Icons" in Windows 7. Unfortunately I had installed a download manager (GetRight) which by default creates a tray icon for each download. I quickly disabled this but still have a ton of entries in that menu and it's annoying.

I found an article that had me navigate to this key in the registry...

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

delete IconStreams and PastIconStreams, then restart, but it did not clear the list.

Any ideas on this one?

Answer 1

Glad to hear you solved your problem. If, in the future, you'd like a less cumbersome method of doing that, you could grab CCleaner.

Aside from being an extremely handy Disk-Cleanup-on-steroids application, it has the option to easily wipe those out too -- under the Advanced group, tick "Tray Notifications Cache" and then hit "Run Cleaner". You'll still have to restart explorer.exe, but it is a bit quicker than circumnavigating the Registry. :)

Answer 2

Apparently you need to delete these entries, then open the Task Manager to force-quit explorer.exe and then run explorer.exe again. Worked like a charm!