Remove Old Notification Icons In Windows 7

If you have been running Windows 7 for some time you might notice eventually that some of the notification icons that are displayed in the customize dialog are those of programs that are no longer installed on the computer system. Neither the software program nor the Windows operating system seem to remove those old notification icons from the system tray automatically.

This can be a problem because of two reasons: The customize dialog will grow over time with new notification icons added but none removed. It will take longer to customize the system tray icons. The second is privacy as the icons will reveal information about programs that have been used on the computer system in the past.

The customize window which becomes available after clicking on customize in the system tray area can only be used to hide or show notification icons but there is no way of deleting or removing old icons.

All icons are cached in the Windows Registry. The easiest way to remove the past notification icons – without software – is therefor to delete the Registry keys that contain the cache.

Here is how you can remove old notification icons from the Windows 7 system tray.

• Press [Windows R], type [regedit] and hit [enter]
• Navigate to the Registry key HKCU \Software \Classes \LocalSettings \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \TrayNotify
• Make a backup of the Registry key by right-clicking on TrayNotify and selecting Export.
• Now delete the following two Registry keys: IconStreams and PastIconsStream
• Open the Windows Task Manager with [Ctrl Shift Esc]
• Terminate the explorer.exe process
• Click on File > New Task Run and enter explorer.exe to reload the explorer process

This removes all icons that are currently not in use from the system tray. Users who prefer a software solution can try Tray Cleaner instead.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday February 9, 2010 -
Tags:notification icons, system-tray, tray cleaner, windows 7, windows software

Responses so far:

1. imran says:

   May 11, 2010 at 1:30 am

   thanks alot it is working those hiding icon were making my pc laptop slow but just removed all hidden icon
   thanks alotttt …..great job it is working

   Reply
2. gambit says:

   November 14, 2010 at 5:48 pm

   excellent tip! very helpful! thanks a lot.

   Reply
3. Jonathan says:

   November 20, 2010 at 10:09 pm

   Friggin’ Amazing! you are awesome!

   Reply
4. Dids says:

   December 2, 2010 at 8:55 pm

   this worked great remove unwanted icons from systemtray.thankyou.One slight problems though it removed my action centre option which i quite like and i cant turn it on again any ideas

   Reply
5. Dids says:

   December 2, 2010 at 8:57 pm

   Sorry i retract that last statement action system Icon has come back. Thanks once again for your great and simple instructions this had been bugging me for a while. your a superstar

   Reply
6. Reza says:

   January 14, 2011 at 10:36 pm

   Thank you.
   it was greate.
   i found for exactly this solution.
   searched the Google i found it.
   now this solution is correct and my old pas icons in notification customazion has removed.
   Thank you very much.

   Reply
   • micky t says:

     March 8, 2011 at 11:50 pm

     help guys I have no tray/notify WHAT THE….

     Reply
7. MissJe says:

   May 7, 2011 at 7:42 pm

   nice.. its not messy anymore!..

   Reply
8. SunsetHunter says:

   July 11, 2011 at 4:42 pm

   Thanx heaps – I had a few icons leftover from a clean-up from a nasty trojan and your tip worked a treat! Nice work! :-)

   Reply
9. Anonymous says:

   July 27, 2011 at 12:45 pm

   Thank you very much. very good information.

   Reply
10. de rika says:

    August 11, 2011 at 4:54 pm

    please visit… it work 10000%
    http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/clear-customize-notifications-tray-items-windows-7-vista-xp/

    Reply
11. Prakash Balakrishnan says:

    September 22, 2011 at 5:01 pm

    This is a good one and it worked.

    Reply
12. George Harnett says:

    November 16, 2011 at 9:10 pm

    Thank you for the information about removing old/dead entries in the Notification Area “Customize”. I thought I was going Nuts! I had several entries of utilities and spent half an hour purging the actual executibles from my hard drive before I searched for the problem on the Internet. I used the Regedit approach and it worked fine. Regards.

    Reply
13. annonymous says:

    November 22, 2011 at 9:17 am

    thanks

    Reply
14. Gary says:

    December 17, 2011 at 11:38 pm

    Thank you so much!! I had installed a couple of games and couldnt get rid of these until I found this page. Thanks again so much your a star!!

    Reply
15. Paan says:

    January 15, 2012 at 7:02 am

    Thanks alot.it works like a charm.

    Reply
16. Anonymous says:

    January 25, 2012 at 10:35 pm

    doesn’t work on win 7 x64

    I use ccleaner and nothing

    Reply