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April 26, 2008
Disable Systray in XP
I don't know why I never noticed it until now, but when I'm running MS Outlook 2003 in XP Pro SP2, I have three icons at the bottom of my screen for MS Outlook. One is a shortcut to launch it on the task bar at the bottom left. One is on the taskbar in the middle to show me it's running. And another one is in the systray at the bottom right. I want the one in the systray to go away, but there's no way to remove the Outlook 2003 icon from the systray while Outlook is running. I hate Microsoft, and I hate that I can't gain control of something so gay as the systray on my own computer. So, I'm going to try this registry hack to Disable The System Tray In Windows XP.
1. Click Start and click Run.
2. Type regedit.exe and click OK.
3. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer. If you cannot find the key, you will have to create it using the File, New, Key command.
4. Create a new DWORD value in the key. From the File menu, point to new, and click DWORD value.
5. Type NoTrayItemsDisplay and press Enter.
6. Double click the new DWORD value and enter a value of 1.
7. Exit the Registry Editor.You will need to log off your computer for the changes to take effect. If you want to enable the System Tray, delete the DWORD value you created.
Note: Before you do this, make sure that you launch Outlook 2003 and right click on the icon in the systray, then be sure to uncheck the "Hide When Minimized", option. Otherwise, once your systray disappears, you won't have an Outlook icon in your taskbar. Of course, you can always get your systray back by changing the value of the NoTrayItemsDisplay DWORD to 0.
Update: So far, I think I like using XP without the systray. Microsoft won't allow you to control the systray. That is, they won't let you remove the Outlook icon from the systray. So, I say, then don't show me the systray. I win, in my own confused way.
Posted by Rob Kiser on April 26, 2008 at 5:10 AM
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