We were asked to provide a simple solution to the problem of removing obsolete notification area icons (i.e. icons for programs that are no longer installed) which appear in the list icons for which you can change the notification area behavior. Apart from dedicated software solutions, a simple trick is to remove two registry values and then restart the explorer.exe process. Doing this will basically reset all your notification area icons and keep only your active ones. Since editing the registry is a task for advanced users, we decided to provide a simple tool to assist our readers.

Clean the Notification Area Icon Cache

First, download Notification_Area_Cleaner.bat from the bottom of this article.

To remove the notification area icon cache and restart explorer.exe, double click the downloaded file. You will see a warning because you are trying to run an 'untrusted' file. In the security warning dialog click Run. If you don't want this dialog to appear the next time you run the file, uncheck 'Always ask before opening this file'.

For a short time, while explorer.exe is restarted and the notification area icon cache is cleared, the taskbar and desktop icons will disappear and you will only see a command prompt window like this:

Conclusion & Things to Consider

After restarting explorer.exe, the active programs which had notification area icons will not display them until these programs are restarted (a known example is Yahoo! Messenger). Also, due to this batch file's behavior, some antivirus products may prevent it from running. We assure you it only does what we described here. There is no virus in the file we created.

As you can see, using this file is very simple. If you have other requests or suggestions for quick fixes to common problems, tell us about them. We will be happy to hear from you and might just be able to help.

Related articles:

How to Customize the Notification Area
How to Work with the Action Center
New Features & Improvements in the Windows 7 Taskbar