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I set my Windows 7 taskbar to auto-hide. However, sometimes when a program changes or something new happens in a program, the taskbar will show its self, and its respective taskbar icon will begin flashing orange.

Here's what I'm talking about:

enter image description here

To make the taskbar hide again, I have click on the program before I can go back to what I was doing.

Anyways, I personally find this very annoying, and would love to find a way to either:

  1. Prevent the taskbar from having such alerts.
  2. Prevent the taskbar from showing its self when it has such alerts.

I've searched around quite a bit, and really only found answers to this for XP.

I've also found another Stack Exchange Question looking for the same thing for Windows 7. However, none of the answers to the question were really what I'm looking for. I'm not looking to hide the taskbar, or control the number of flashes.

However, this answer seems to be what I'm looking for, so I downloaded and tried out the program. It works perfectly, other than the fact that the start menu icon is always shown, regardless of the taskbar being set to auto-hide.

So, any ideas on how to fix this problem?

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Steps to disable flashing icon on Taskbar - Windows 7

  1. Click the Start icon
  2. Type in regedit
  3. Select regedit from the top of the result
  4. Go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
  5. Editing ForegroundFlashCount
    1. Find ForegroundFlashCount
    2. Double click ForegroundFlashCount
    3. Replace the value for Value Data with 1
  6. Editing ForgroundLockTimeout
    1. Find ForegroundLockTimeout
    2. Double click ForegroundLockTimeout
    3. Replace the value for Value Data with 0
  7. Reboot

This is the way to do it without any 3rd-party applications. The steps are in detail steps to help both experienced and non-experienced users.

Disclaimer : You should always backup your registry before editing your registry.

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up vote 0 down vote

Try the free option given above. If it doesn't work, TuneUp Utilities 2011 has a feature to disable this:

enter image description here

It's not free, but they have a 15 day trial (so you can ensure it does work).

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I just tried out this program. Unfortunately, after using this setting and restarting my computer, the flashing still exists: i.imgur.com/d2g63.png – Jebego Jul 29 '11 at 23:13
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up vote 0 down vote

I'm pretty sure this is by design. In the old days, an application would steal focus and/or pop up a dialog box to inform you of, say, a finished download. Newer porgrams will play a sound, pop a notification balloon.

If they got rid of this, how is a program suppose to let you know "hey I'm done!" or "Oh no! Someone setup us the bomb!!!"

I can't think of a reason why you would want to get rid of this. If anything, you are forcing applications to go back to the old style. . .

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I personally have never found much of a use for this feature. Maybe it would help someone with a different program set than me. However, what I'm really looking for is not to remove it completely, but remove the fact that it shows the taksbar. – Jebego Jul 30 '11 at 2:25
I, too, would like to get rid of that. It's highly annoying when task bar hides part of your screen, ie. preventing you from seeing part the window you're working on, and not highlighting which program causes that. The only way to resolve this is to scan through the windows on task bar clicking every one of them in turn until the task bar hides again. – Zds Aug 17 '11 at 12:39
@Zds: Odd which application is it? Mine will stay flashed indefinitely. . . – surfasb Aug 17 '11 at 16:32
@surfasb, owners should be in control of their computers. If they want to hide the taskbar and not see blinky distracting notifications, they should be a choice they can make (and live with the consequences thereof). This appears to be what Jebego has chosen. – Robert Kerr Aug 21 '11 at 16:57
You ARE in control of your machine. But control != knowledge. – surfasb Aug 22 '11 at 4:18
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