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I thought this was a simple question, but from perusing dozens of boards, it seems that most people refer to thumb previews. I'm interested in turning off the annoying hover task list in the taskbar. I have turned off thumbs. But I cannot seem to turn off the list.

I've tried the hover time setting and that doesn't work either.

I can't post a picture in here, so I'll try to describe it:

You have your taskbar set to NOT group. So you have, say, 2 Windows Explorer icons on your taskbar. When you mouse over them, a list (not thumb) appears telling you what you have open. I don't want a list. That's why I set it to NOT group. So each one stands on its own and I don't need a list when I mouse over.

Thanks in advance for any help you might have.

2 Answers 2

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7+ Taskbar Tweaker can do that.

Screenshot with 'Hovering' section outlined

It's lightweight, it's powerful and you will never want to work without it anymore ;)

Another 7+TT's feature you may be interested in is the Combining section: you can disable window combining without enabling labels (as seen in the screenshot). One application's windows will still be grouped, but not combined:

GIMP windows shown grouped, but not combined in the taskbar

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  • Glad I could help. You can say "thank you" by upvoting or accepting my answer :)
    – gronostaj
    Sep 3, 2013 at 20:42
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Here's a way to do it without installing any software:

According to Gokul T.'s answer in answers.microsoft.com, while you can disable the thumbnail previews, you can't disable the hover list completely; however, you can apply a delay so that it doesn't show up unless you leave the cursor there for a while. Here are the instructions:

You can disable the taskbar thumbnail feature (sort of) in Windows 7 using a registry edit. This can be done by setting the taskbar thumbnail preview hover delay to a large value (say 10000 milliseconds or more), so that the preview is not immediately generated when you hover over a taskbar icon.

  1. Click Start, type regedit.exe and press ENTER

  2. Navigate to the following location:

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced

  3. Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named ExtendedUIHoverTime

  4. Double-click ExtendedUIHoverTime and click Decimal

  5. To increase the hover delay to 5 seconds, type 5000. Type 10000 for 10 seconds and so forth…

  6. Exit the Registry Editor.

  7. Restart your computer.

I tested this, and it seems to work.

Alternatively, if you don't feel like navigating around in the registry editor's interface, here's a script that should add the key with a delay of 10 seconds. Just copy the following to a text editor:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"ExtendedUIHoverTime"=dword:00002710

...and save it as a .reg file. You should then be able to double-click the file to automatically apply the changes in the registry. NOTE: I haven't tested this method, so I can't guarantee it works.

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  • 1
    This answer seems to have have fewer upvotes than it deserves because people would reboot in order to find out whether the original formulation of the answer works. In fact, rebooting is not necessary, restarting explorer.exe is enough.
    – root
    Feb 27, 2022 at 22:59

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