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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?

5 Answers 5

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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. :)

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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!

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Freeware tool Notification Area Cleaner for Windows 7 deletes the registry entries and restarts explorer.exe.

It comes as a standalone .executable.

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Freeware tool Notification Area Cleaner deletes the registry entries and restarts explorer.exe.

It comes as a standalone .batch file: enter image description here

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Full source code:

@echo off

:: Notification Area Cleaner
:: Created by Hally Master hally_master (at) yahoo (dot) com
:: Distributed by www.7tutorials.com
:: WARNING! This utility restarts your shell (Explorer.exe) and clears your notification area icon cache

taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify" /v IconStreams /f
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify" /v PastIconsStream /f
start "Shell Restarter" /d "%systemroot%" /i /normal explorer.exe
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taskkill / im explorer.exe /f
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify"/v IconStreams/f
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify"/v PastIconsStreams/f
start "ShellRestarter"/d "%systemroot%"/i/normal explorer.exe

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