I have written about Past Icons in Windows before and described a manual way on how to remove those icons from your system. Every icon that appears in the system tray is cached by Windows and will remain in that cache even if you uninstall the application completely from your computer. You can take a look at all cached items on your system if you like to see that they can reveal information about your system even if you thought that you did leave no traces of an application behind.
Right-click the Windows taskbar and select Properties from the menu. Now click on the Customize button which opens a window entitled Custom Notifications. That window is divided into current items which are those that are currently active on your system and past icons which are the icons that are stored in the cache. This includes icons from applications that are still installed on the system but also from those that are no longer installed on the computer.
Past Icons Flusher is a software that clears those past icons automatically which means that you do not have to go into the Registry and remove them manually. The program asks you during execution if you want to flush the Past Icons, a click on Yes starts the process while a click on No cancels it.
Please note that the explorer instance is killed in the process but it should restart just fine after the Past Icons have been removed.
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Does flushing of icons adds some benefit to the system?
Mutant no I do not think so. It’s in my opinion only privacy related
Quite a few antiviruses’ heuristics give a warning about this file: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/abfc7b11a7daec1814876d279c8709e9
Hmmm, I wonder if CCleaner does this as part of its registry clean? Can’t see that it does.
Then again, maybe it does.
http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=15235
I don’t have any icons in this area (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify).
I believe this might be because I have “Hide inactive icons” turned off in the taskbar properties?