How to remove past icons from the taskbar

You have uninstalled the program completely and are sure that no reference is left on your computer. What if there is still one left that you probably did not know about ? Every item that appears on the left side of the clock in the taskbar will be cached by windows which means that the icon of the program is still available on your system. Check this out by yourself by right-clicking the taskbar. Select properties from the menu and click on the customize button at the bottom of that screen. If customize is not active activated it by enabling Hide Inactive Icons.

The list shows the current items at the top and past items below the current item list. I had about thirty entries of programs of which I was not using more than ten which ment that there were twenty entries with no meaning at all in there. Clearing this list is pretty easy, do the following:

• Backup your registry first
• Open your registry by hitting the left windows key + R ; Navigate to
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current-Version\Explorer\TrayNotify
• Remove the keys IconStreams and PastIconStreams.
• Close the registry and reboot your machine.

Windows will compile a list of available icons after the restart which means that all entries of programs that you used in the past will be gone.