Do you need to remove obsolete icons from the notification area on the Windows taskbar? Do you see icons for apps that are no longer installed, and you want to get rid of them? While you can do this with dedicated apps, a simple trick is to remove two registry values and then restart the explorer.exe process in Windows. Here are two methods for cleaning the icons shown in the notification area, on your Windows PC:
NOTE: This guide applies to all versions of Windows, from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
The problem: too many icons in the notification area
After using Windows for a while, installing and uninstalling apps, you end up with a long list of icons showing up in the notification area, on the taskbar. Just look at the screenshot below. Too many icons, right?
Icons in the notifications area of Windows
One way to get rid of them is to uninstall the apps that you do not use. However, you may have removed some of those apps, but their icons are still shown. What do you do to fix this problem?
Solution 1: Download, extract and run our notification area icon cache cleaner
To clean the cache for the notification area and restart explorer.exe, double-click or double-tap on Notification_Area_Cleaner.bat. Windows might warn you that the publisher could not be verified. Do not worry! You are safe. In the security warning dialog, click Run.
Running the Notification Area Cleaner
For a brief period, the taskbar and your desktop icons are going to disappear. The explorer.exe process restarts, and the notification area icon cache is cleared. After a few seconds, everything is back to normal.
NOTE: Some security solutions might warn you or prevent you from running our batch file. We are not distributing malware. This file does what we say it does. However, we can't provide any warranties either. To confirm that we are not distributing malware, you can check our ZIP file yourself, using VirusTotal.com.
Solution 2: Download, extract and run Notification Area Cleaner for Windows 7
Another solution is to download the Notification Area Cleaner for Windows 7. While this app was made for Windows 7, it works just as well in Windows 10. Download the version that you want (32-bit or 64-bit), extract the contents of the archive, and run the NotificationsCleaner.exe file. When you hit the Clean button, the icons from the notification area are reset in a matter of seconds.
Notification Area Cleaner for Windows 7
Just like our solution, this app too, is provided "as-is" without any warranties.
The icons from the notification area are now cleared. What's next?
After using any of the two solutions that we provided, the icons from the notification area cleaned, and you see only those loaded by default, by Windows, like in the screenshot below.
The default icons in the notification area of Windows
Both solutions do the same thing. Try them out and let us know which one you like. If you know other user-friendly tools for cleaning the notification area icons, comment below and share them with us.
Props to this article. Finally worked! bloody musicbee wouldnt go away
Brian ·
Perfect! Worked exactly as explained. Nice work, and thank you!!!
Scott ·
Amazing! When the software was ready to use, I clicked on it expecting menus to pop up to step me thru the program, it was done. Simply clicking on the program it did its job… Thanks!
Ritesh Kumar ·
Thanks, it worked fine for me.
I was thinking programs were not uninstalled properly, but it was just notification cache problem. Thanks alot… 🙂
Soahum ·
Thanks a ton !!! It really helped !!
Nikhil ·
Thnk you Dude! Thumbs up! 🙂
Peter Maria ·
Dear Friend,
Really say thanks for you. Who is made this great job very very thanks for you and your jobs
Marion ·
Great to see simply effective utilities like this.
You may want to develop malware killers next time, free 🙂
Thanks a lot. Mabuhay!
An T ·
This help is very good to get rid of so many notification on my task bar. Thank you very much
coolio ·
Does it work with windows 10?
Nomad ·
Doesn’t seem to work under Win 10. Have stuff from before installing Win 10 that I hoped to remove with this tool but nothing changed after running the program as an Administrator.
Men8te ·
Have been looking for someone to explain how to remove obsolete notification area icons for quite some time…without any success……until I came across this fabulous gem…..thank you, thank you.
poupi ·
very nice and quick Thanks a lot!!!
thank f**k ·
worked 100% thanks,
Liston ·
Worked great on Windows 8.1. Thanks, couldn’t have been easier.
chris ·
on windows 8.1 working as well !
Sherry ·
Ran this on Win 7 64bit Ultimate and it worked like a charm. I didn’t have to rerun anything to get it to show in the notification area. Sweet. 😉
Kathy ·
That’s a great tool – thanks for the help!
UXangel ·
It’s real. It works.
Had stubborn icons left over from infected programs my Win 7 laptop. MWbytes and combofix dealt with the rogue programs. But this bat file was the only thing that worked on the dead icons. Genius! Many thanks 🙂
Bliss ·
Thank You it worked perfectly
amidat ·
I wanted to delete unwanted Notification Area Icons. I was unsuccessful until I found this page. I downloaded the bat file and ran it. It worked GREAT!!! Thanks
Anne ·
Awesome! I only just recently noticed left overs in there. A search led me here, and 5 minutes later, all left overs are gone! Skype and MS Security were running when I did it, so their icons automatically reappeared (along with network, volume, etc…) Thanks!
shiha ·
thanks a lot
Dale ·
Thank you for this i really needed that
Torben From Denmark ·
YES! I love it, I have been used so many hours to find a solution for this system tray overload, and here i was. Thank you so much!!
Regards
Torben, Denmark
Fred ·
Thanks a lot. This worked wonders. This program should really be implemented as a standard function in Win 8.1.
Glenn ·
Windows 7 won’t stop showing “email downloads completed” notifications. I’ve set the email notices to “hide icons and notifications”, but it still brings up a window telling me how many downloads have been completed. Any idea how to stop this notification effectively….? Thx.
Peter ·
This worked great on Windows 8.1
It only deleted the bad apps that were no longer on my system. This was better than I expected.
I thought I might have to touch all my apps again to get them in the notification task list but I didn’t.
Thank you so much for this tool.
Gabriel Da Silva Pereira ·
Good job bro ! Thank you so much, you saved my life.
Elie ·
Worked, thanks!
shaq ·
it works
JBH ·
Thanks so much, it worked great and really fast on my Windows 8.1 system…APPRECIATE IT!
rick tyczkowski ·
im having very slow internet,i have a mini desktop acer aspire ax3-100 with 5700 ati 7660hd video and 12 GB of ram,running windows 8.1 pro, i installed pro but tripped on the power cord, when i turned it back on, it said installing updates please wait, then it boot and said i had win8.1 pro installed, but sfc /scannow say i have bad system files that cannot be fixed, i tried in both windows and safe windows, still cant fix, now i have very very slow internet and page loading,i have tried everything,i have a disk of win8.1 pro but i got the computer at a pawn shop so i dont have the bios password to change the boot order,so im stuck and dont have a clue on what to do, before i installed the 8.1 update from microsoft my computer was super fast, but now its slow and i dont think its the wireless card, i have to use wireless cause i cant get a cable all the way down into the basement room where i live, but the landlord has wireless thank god and im hook that way and like i say 6 months ago it was super fast,then the 8.1 update slowed it down but only alittle, installing win8.1 pro and tripping on the power cord was what made everything go from bad to very very bad,,the only thing i can think of is a factory reset, i can do that i think,,refresh will not work tried that allready,even if i could get internet going alittle faster id be happy,i have tried allmost all the scanners for adware spyware,found a bad one but got rid of it, well so i think,,do u have any ideas on how to get the net going faster on my wireless card or a way to fix system files,i have win8.1 pro disk,it a torrent and actavation is added so all i need is to boot from my dvd, thats drive E on my computer,thank you,happy new year
raka ·
funtastic thanks
bharath ·
thank you so much for helping out.
jtb9265 ·
Hi Ciprian,
I used the Notification Area Cleaner and it worked great. Does the .bat file do anything more than remove those 2 files from the registry and restart Explorer.exe? In other words, does it do exactly the same thing as if I had removed those files from the registry myself and restarted Explorer.exe? Thanks! JB
Zise ·
It worked on my Windows 8.1. A nice and simple tutorial. Thanks
Simi A. ·
WOW, Ive struggled with fixing the notifications in m toolbar, some icons wouldn’t show I even made restore to earlier time and that didn’t work either. Now I found this miraculous cleaner!! I saw the command just for a second and the running normal icons are on task bar but no arrow but at least I see the network icon and others, strange how they disappeared and I couldn’t restore to default. Thanks so much for this download!!!
Nishant ·
Some TuneUp thing got downloaded.. And i can’t remove it from the notification bar.. tried this nut didn’t work.. what to do now?
John ·
Thanks!
Antony ·
Absolutely spot on :!! it cleaned the junk out that the pc shop left on after the so kindly installed crappy avg and other muck, i uninstalled these only to be left with much muck in the tray notifier area. op system win 7 premium, 64 bit
shane ·
I would like to know if it is safe to run this over and over again (daily). I have a process that runs every two hours and it fills the tray with dozens of dead icons. This trick refreshes it and removes them. I’m worried that it could somehow hurt the PC?
Stu ·
Fantastic, thank you!!!
ky ·
Great cleaner for the notification tray. Easy and fast.
Ian ·
Wow,
Nice program. My pc must be fast (ssd) as I barely saw the screen flick. Thanks for the program.
Ciprian Adrian Rusen ·
It’s runtime takes less than a second. 🙂
Dean Consta ·
Excellent piece of tool !!! One of the very -very-very few times I followed instructions without any annoying ads and it was so effective too !!!
THANK YOU VERY_VERY MUCH!!!
Ciprian Adrian Rusen ·
I’m glad our article has helped you. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to one of our newsletters and receive our content on a regular basis. You will surely find other useful articles.
sfk ·
Thank you! Very usefull!
Michelle ·
Works like a charm
Thank you
Lar Gram ·
I was fearful but trusted. It worked brilliantly. Thank you!
I feel like this is one function that should have been baked into Windows 7 and 8 anyway.
Lar ·
Forgot to mention: Windows 7.
JK ·
Brilliant, worked on the exceedingly paranoid windows 8.1 , thanks really appreciated
Happy ·
An awesome utility tool… Thanks a lot…
Cheers to you man.. (y)
LAO ·
Just excellent tool!, literally “click and go”!
Thanks!
Steve from England ·
What a great little tool. Worked perfectly on my HP laptop with windows 7. Thank you very much. Software that works as well as this, are few and far between. There is so much rubbish software around these days. Is there any chance of any more? Have a nice day.
Shreyas ·
Thank You It Works
BB ·
Other suggested solutions I found seemed unduly complicated to a non-techie like me. Then I found this – short, simple, quick, worked for me on Win 8.1. Neat job. Many thanks.
skyrail ·
For many years, I could not understand why some of my app did not appear in the system tray, and an icon did not match with the app name.
The best solution, working most of the time, was to kill a task, then relaunch it.
Then you brought this clean solution on a platter.
That is a post of great value.
Thank you.
Tim MacVicar ·
Wow! That was so fast and easy I barely new it happened. Thank you
Mini ·
It worked perfectly on windows 7 pro..
Will it work on win 8.1 also ..???
For those who thought its may be infected , below is the result ;
I do have the same problem with my wireless connection icon – it changed from showing the connection strength to showing a red x even though the internet connection is fully functional. Have tried a lot of things, cleaning manually those register entries also. Still can not figure out what triggered on problem. And this .bat file wan’nt works for me neither. Any solutions or ideas, please.
Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit
JeffS66 ·
WOW!…..worked great!!…wish I had come here first instead of wasting about 2 hours last night looking for a solution. Well done!!
Ciprian Adrian Rusen ·
I’m glad we helped. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to our site and check our articles from time to time. You might find other useful stuff.
Computerdude ·
Interesting. I opened the batch file with Notepad to see what it was going to do, and found two commands to delete two keys in the registry. I found them and deleted them manually, then rebooted, but nothing seemed to have happened. Then I ran the batch file normally and it worked! Strange though…
Thanks, this’ll never get old for me!
Murai ·
Thanks! It’s a great idea to kill the explorer before deleting registry values.
Gayle ·
Brilliant! … After hours of trying a million other things. Thank you.
Lil ·
Thanks ! This do just what i wanted it do.
Wesley Hall ·
Spent hours trying to solve and then found this beauty! I’m a little angry now because it worked so fast and so well after I’d been trying for hours. Thanks a million times!!
Ciprian Adrian Rusen ·
I’m happy were able to help you. Don’t hesitate to pay us a visit from time to time. I’m sure you will find other useful content on our website.
Mike ·
stopped by here searching for something else, and found this little gem that solved a long-standing problem- THANKS!
Brett Smith ·
Thanks this got me out of bother thanks again
Dev ·
AntiVirus rang
tiuperman ·
good job dude…………….
Vasanth ·
my only word “superb”.Thanks..a lot
Mike Royal ·
Worked like a dream for me on a Win 8 computer.
Only wish I had found this tip hours ago.
Many Thanks.
Ken McKinney ·
Excellent article and batch file. Fixed my problem with leftover icons in the Notification Area after the programs had been uninstalled. Microsoft was of no help what-so-ever. Thank you so much for the expert help that Microsoft is failing to provide.
Ken Arntsen ·
I ran the bat file but it stopped with a message that Windows could not find explorer.exepar
Is there some way to get round this. (Win 7 (64))
ixmybu ·
I had a problem with my wireless connection icon – it changed from showing the connection strength to showing a red x even though the internet connection was fully functional. Restarting the computer and enabling/disabling the adapter did nothing but this .bat program restored the icon to its original form straight away. Thanks!
Peter ·
I do have the same problem with my wireless connection icon – it changed from showing the connection strength to showing a red x even though the internet connection is fully functional. Have tried a lot of things, cleaning manually those register entries also. Still can not figure out what triggered on problem. And this .bat file wan’nt works for me neither. Any solutions or ideas, please.
Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Jack Simeon ·
That has to do with a malfunction in the windows tray area of “explorer.exe”. This can be easily fixed with a little registry tweaking. I must put a disclaimer on this method:.
Modifying REGISTRY settings incorrectly can cause serious problems that may prevent your computer from booting properly. I cannot guarantee that any problems resulting from the configuring of REGISTRY settings can be solved. Modifications of these settings are at your own risk. As long as you follow ALL and ONLY these steps, you will be fine. Here’s what you need to do:
1. Click Start -> Run then type regedit in the box that appears and click ok.
2. In regedit, navigate to the following registry key:
3. Delete the ‘Icon Streams’ and ‘Past Icons Stream’ values.
Now you’ll need to recycle Explorer.exe by opening up task manager (You can use Ctrl+Shift+Esc), selecting explorer.exe in the list of processes and choosing End Process.
Now go to the File menu, choose New Task and type in explorer.exe into the open box. Hit enter, and explorer should restart itself. Depending on how many programs you run/install, you may have to repeat the process regularly.
Hope this helps!
ali ·
thanx. It is accurate information.
Liz GM ·
Awesome, worked like a charm! (Although once I clicked End Process, my desktop went blank… Had to re-open/restart Task Manager again and just clicked New Task button.) Thanks for easy fix with no install!
Steve ·
I had an issue with my notification area where the icons I usually show in the taskbar were missing (not just shown without an image, I mean totally missing) and the icons in the notification area were almost all blank. I only had two or three icons that were still actually visible and they were scattered (not all lined up in a row – there were blanks between them…read on). For the rest, there were still other “slots” filled, but not the correct number of slots and no icon appeared in them – they were just “blank” icon slots. Then, every 15 seconds to 2 minutes I would have another blank icon or two appear in my notification area. If left alone, the notification area would swell to take up about half of the entire screen when expanded to view the icons inside. There was no tooltip when you hover the mouse over the blank icons, and moving your mouse across the blank icons would cause many of them to disappear when your mouse moved away from that blank icon. So by moving your mouse around in circles over the expanded notification area you could basically clear out all but a few of the blank icons…but the process never stopped. Even after wiping out most of the blank icons you would still rack up more of them over time – and at the same pace as before. None of them were click-able (with the left or right mouse buttons) but they all showed the shadow “hover” background when your mouse was over them. Truly strange. It always happened right from start-up so I removed what few programs I could from my start-up list (which I always keep very lean in the first place), I disabled a few non-essential services, and rebooted to see if it helped. Nothing changed.
My problem wasn’t like most of the taskbar/notification area icon problems I had found in search engine results while trying to find an answer to this. I read plenty of pages about people who had icons that were blank, but their icons were still functional (they had a tooltip, they were still responsive to left and right clicking, etc.)…and they had no infinitely recurring periodic creation of additional blank icons that would disappear when the mouse was moved across them. So none of those solutions seemed to be right for me. The symptoms my system were showing did not fit the mold. Google’s auto-suggestions in their search field lead me to believe that I am far from alone in this problem, but none of their search results actually described my situation.
Well, out of options, I tried this batch file solution anyway and BANG – I have my taskbar icons back where they should have been, my missing notification icons have returned, all icons are functional, and I have NO blank icons appearing.
This appears to have fixed the issue completely. I mention this here in case anyone else has the same symptoms my machine had. I want them to realize that this is still apparently a result of a corrupt icon db, though for me it showed very different signs than the classic symptoms most people experience with that type of error. Hopefully this narrative will become a beacon in Google’s search results to help people with this specific issue – because nothing else seems to be so far…
Vince Johnson ·
Thanks, I’ve been trying to get rid of a certain notification icon for a while and this finally did it.
Thank you SO much!
Ashok ·
really useful. Thanks a lot
ROBERT CLARK RUTKOWSKI ·
I downloaded the app and it was a txt file so I simply edited it to a bat file in Notepad and when I ran it and then checked the Notification Tray, it was clean as a whistle. It quickly began rebuiiding whatever icons it needed. Great tool.
Patti ·
Disregard my previous post – the file downloaded on my desktop…
but the program didn’t work – probably because I have Vista and the program is for Windows 7, right?
Any suggestions for removing the icon in the task bar for a program that’s been uninstalled?
Thanks!
Ciprian Adrian Rusen ·
Yes… the file we shared is for Windows 7 only. To remove a shortcut from the taskbar in Windows Vista, can’t you right click on it and select delete?
Patti ·
The link to this program is not downloading…..
Using Vista Home Edition 32 bit and Google Chrome – is it my system or the link?
On a completely different note a made a bit of a mess of my system – couldn’t uninstall program and I think I made things worse troubleshooting Windows Installer – any suggestions for a great Windows troubleshooting site would be appreciated – I’m stunned that I can’t seem to find a solution to that problem…..
And I came here because I have a task bar icon for a program that I uninstalled
I receive this screen message when I click on the above link……
@echo off
:: Notification Area Cleaner
:: (c) 2009 Hally Master hally_master (at) yahoo (dot) com
:: Provided by http://www.digitalcitizen.life
:: WARNING! This utility restarts your shell (Explorer.exe) and deletes your notification area icons
I don’t know why I ended up with loads of MSI****.tmp files in the notification area preferences…bloody Windows. You helped save my day and sanity!
Ciprian Adrian Rusen ·
We’re glad we could help. 😀
Anonymous ·
Thank you! Worked great. This was worth something. Would have paid for it.
Anonymous ·
Thanks a lot for the small .bat program. Worked like charm.
Anonymous ·
Well, I ran it … but explorer never came back! I need to restart the computer. *sigh*
Blob ·
You can always restart explorer with [Windows Key]+[R], type “explorer”, [Return/Enter]
Anonymous ·
Worked like a charm – Hard to find utility programs like this for Win7 – works on both 32 and 64 bit. Had to run it from the desktop, hopefully Microsoft will include it in a future update.
Ahmed ·
Great
Been looking around for something like this, tried Tray Cleaner but it didn’t work then saw a link to this article at tinyhacker.com which worked like a charm, thanks guys this helped a lot.
Ciprian ·
Thanks for the comment. It is nice to see people find our work to be useful.
Discussion (102)
Amazing!!! Thank you so much.
Props to this article. Finally worked! bloody musicbee wouldnt go away
Perfect! Worked exactly as explained. Nice work, and thank you!!!
Amazing! When the software was ready to use, I clicked on it expecting menus to pop up to step me thru the program, it was done. Simply clicking on the program it did its job… Thanks!
Thanks, it worked fine for me.
I was thinking programs were not uninstalled properly, but it was just notification cache problem. Thanks alot… 🙂
Thanks a ton !!! It really helped !!
Thnk you Dude! Thumbs up! 🙂
Dear Friend,
Really say thanks for you. Who is made this great job very very thanks for you and your jobs
Great to see simply effective utilities like this.
You may want to develop malware killers next time, free 🙂
Thanks a lot. Mabuhay!
This help is very good to get rid of so many notification on my task bar. Thank you very much
Does it work with windows 10?
Doesn’t seem to work under Win 10. Have stuff from before installing Win 10 that I hoped to remove with this tool but nothing changed after running the program as an Administrator.
Have been looking for someone to explain how to remove obsolete notification area icons for quite some time…without any success……until I came across this fabulous gem…..thank you, thank you.
very nice and quick Thanks a lot!!!
worked 100% thanks,
Worked great on Windows 8.1. Thanks, couldn’t have been easier.
on windows 8.1 working as well !
Ran this on Win 7 64bit Ultimate and it worked like a charm. I didn’t have to rerun anything to get it to show in the notification area. Sweet. 😉
That’s a great tool – thanks for the help!
It’s real. It works.
Had stubborn icons left over from infected programs my Win 7 laptop. MWbytes and combofix dealt with the rogue programs. But this bat file was the only thing that worked on the dead icons. Genius! Many thanks 🙂
Thank You it worked perfectly
I wanted to delete unwanted Notification Area Icons. I was unsuccessful until I found this page. I downloaded the bat file and ran it. It worked GREAT!!! Thanks
Awesome! I only just recently noticed left overs in there. A search led me here, and 5 minutes later, all left overs are gone! Skype and MS Security were running when I did it, so their icons automatically reappeared (along with network, volume, etc…) Thanks!
thanks a lot
Thank you for this i really needed that
YES! I love it, I have been used so many hours to find a solution for this system tray overload, and here i was. Thank you so much!!
Regards
Torben, Denmark
Thanks a lot. This worked wonders. This program should really be implemented as a standard function in Win 8.1.
Windows 7 won’t stop showing “email downloads completed” notifications. I’ve set the email notices to “hide icons and notifications”, but it still brings up a window telling me how many downloads have been completed. Any idea how to stop this notification effectively….? Thx.
This worked great on Windows 8.1
It only deleted the bad apps that were no longer on my system. This was better than I expected.
I thought I might have to touch all my apps again to get them in the notification task list but I didn’t.
Thank you so much for this tool.
Good job bro ! Thank you so much, you saved my life.
Worked, thanks!
it works
Thanks so much, it worked great and really fast on my Windows 8.1 system…APPRECIATE IT!
im having very slow internet,i have a mini desktop acer aspire ax3-100 with 5700 ati 7660hd video and 12 GB of ram,running windows 8.1 pro, i installed pro but tripped on the power cord, when i turned it back on, it said installing updates please wait, then it boot and said i had win8.1 pro installed, but sfc /scannow say i have bad system files that cannot be fixed, i tried in both windows and safe windows, still cant fix, now i have very very slow internet and page loading,i have tried everything,i have a disk of win8.1 pro but i got the computer at a pawn shop so i dont have the bios password to change the boot order,so im stuck and dont have a clue on what to do, before i installed the 8.1 update from microsoft my computer was super fast, but now its slow and i dont think its the wireless card, i have to use wireless cause i cant get a cable all the way down into the basement room where i live, but the landlord has wireless thank god and im hook that way and like i say 6 months ago it was super fast,then the 8.1 update slowed it down but only alittle, installing win8.1 pro and tripping on the power cord was what made everything go from bad to very very bad,,the only thing i can think of is a factory reset, i can do that i think,,refresh will not work tried that allready,even if i could get internet going alittle faster id be happy,i have tried allmost all the scanners for adware spyware,found a bad one but got rid of it, well so i think,,do u have any ideas on how to get the net going faster on my wireless card or a way to fix system files,i have win8.1 pro disk,it a torrent and actavation is added so all i need is to boot from my dvd, thats drive E on my computer,thank you,happy new year
funtastic thanks
thank you so much for helping out.
Hi Ciprian,
I used the Notification Area Cleaner and it worked great. Does the .bat file do anything more than remove those 2 files from the registry and restart Explorer.exe? In other words, does it do exactly the same thing as if I had removed those files from the registry myself and restarted Explorer.exe? Thanks! JB
It worked on my Windows 8.1. A nice and simple tutorial. Thanks
WOW, Ive struggled with fixing the notifications in m toolbar, some icons wouldn’t show I even made restore to earlier time and that didn’t work either. Now I found this miraculous cleaner!! I saw the command just for a second and the running normal icons are on task bar but no arrow but at least I see the network icon and others, strange how they disappeared and I couldn’t restore to default. Thanks so much for this download!!!
Some TuneUp thing got downloaded.. And i can’t remove it from the notification bar.. tried this nut didn’t work.. what to do now?
Thanks!
Absolutely spot on :!! it cleaned the junk out that the pc shop left on after the so kindly installed crappy avg and other muck, i uninstalled these only to be left with much muck in the tray notifier area. op system win 7 premium, 64 bit
I would like to know if it is safe to run this over and over again (daily). I have a process that runs every two hours and it fills the tray with dozens of dead icons. This trick refreshes it and removes them. I’m worried that it could somehow hurt the PC?
Fantastic, thank you!!!
Great cleaner for the notification tray. Easy and fast.
Wow,
Nice program. My pc must be fast (ssd) as I barely saw the screen flick. Thanks for the program.
It’s runtime takes less than a second. 🙂
Excellent piece of tool !!! One of the very -very-very few times I followed instructions without any annoying ads and it was so effective too !!!
THANK YOU VERY_VERY MUCH!!!
I’m glad our article has helped you. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to one of our newsletters and receive our content on a regular basis. You will surely find other useful articles.
Thank you! Very usefull!
Works like a charm
Thank you
I was fearful but trusted. It worked brilliantly. Thank you!
I feel like this is one function that should have been baked into Windows 7 and 8 anyway.
Forgot to mention: Windows 7.
Brilliant, worked on the exceedingly paranoid windows 8.1 , thanks really appreciated
An awesome utility tool… Thanks a lot…
Cheers to you man.. (y)
Just excellent tool!, literally “click and go”!
Thanks!
What a great little tool. Worked perfectly on my HP laptop with windows 7. Thank you very much. Software that works as well as this, are few and far between. There is so much rubbish software around these days. Is there any chance of any more? Have a nice day.
Thank You It Works
Other suggested solutions I found seemed unduly complicated to a non-techie like me. Then I found this – short, simple, quick, worked for me on Win 8.1. Neat job. Many thanks.
For many years, I could not understand why some of my app did not appear in the system tray, and an icon did not match with the app name.
The best solution, working most of the time, was to kill a task, then relaunch it.
Then you brought this clean solution on a platter.
That is a post of great value.
Thank you.
Wow! That was so fast and easy I barely new it happened. Thank you
It worked perfectly on windows 7 pro..
Will it work on win 8.1 also ..???
For those who thought its may be infected , below is the result ;
URL:
Detection ratio: 0 / 52
https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/91e14341e71a220ba19b573195b3794cc93d64a43d76142ef3ddb6efe6d9810c/analysis/1398160953/
Brilliant !
I do have the same problem with my wireless connection icon – it changed from showing the connection strength to showing a red x even though the internet connection is fully functional. Have tried a lot of things, cleaning manually those register entries also. Still can not figure out what triggered on problem. And this .bat file wan’nt works for me neither. Any solutions or ideas, please.
Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit
WOW!…..worked great!!…wish I had come here first instead of wasting about 2 hours last night looking for a solution. Well done!!
I’m glad we helped. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to our site and check our articles from time to time. You might find other useful stuff.
Interesting. I opened the batch file with Notepad to see what it was going to do, and found two commands to delete two keys in the registry. I found them and deleted them manually, then rebooted, but nothing seemed to have happened. Then I ran the batch file normally and it worked! Strange though…
Thanks, this’ll never get old for me!
Thanks! It’s a great idea to kill the explorer before deleting registry values.
Brilliant! … After hours of trying a million other things. Thank you.
Thanks ! This do just what i wanted it do.
Spent hours trying to solve and then found this beauty! I’m a little angry now because it worked so fast and so well after I’d been trying for hours. Thanks a million times!!
I’m happy were able to help you. Don’t hesitate to pay us a visit from time to time. I’m sure you will find other useful content on our website.
stopped by here searching for something else, and found this little gem that solved a long-standing problem- THANKS!
Thanks this got me out of bother thanks again
AntiVirus rang
good job dude…………….
my only word “superb”.Thanks..a lot
Worked like a dream for me on a Win 8 computer.
Only wish I had found this tip hours ago.
Many Thanks.
Excellent article and batch file. Fixed my problem with leftover icons in the Notification Area after the programs had been uninstalled. Microsoft was of no help what-so-ever. Thank you so much for the expert help that Microsoft is failing to provide.
I ran the bat file but it stopped with a message that Windows could not find explorer.exepar
Is there some way to get round this. (Win 7 (64))
I had a problem with my wireless connection icon – it changed from showing the connection strength to showing a red x even though the internet connection was fully functional. Restarting the computer and enabling/disabling the adapter did nothing but this .bat program restored the icon to its original form straight away. Thanks!
I do have the same problem with my wireless connection icon – it changed from showing the connection strength to showing a red x even though the internet connection is fully functional. Have tried a lot of things, cleaning manually those register entries also. Still can not figure out what triggered on problem. And this .bat file wan’nt works for me neither. Any solutions or ideas, please.
Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit
That has to do with a malfunction in the windows tray area of “explorer.exe”. This can be easily fixed with a little registry tweaking. I must put a disclaimer on this method:.
Modifying REGISTRY settings incorrectly can cause serious problems that may prevent your computer from booting properly. I cannot guarantee that any problems resulting from the configuring of REGISTRY settings can be solved. Modifications of these settings are at your own risk. As long as you follow ALL and ONLY these steps, you will be fine. Here’s what you need to do:
1. Click Start -> Run then type regedit in the box that appears and click ok.
2. In regedit, navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareClassesLocal SettingsSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionTrayNotify
3. Delete the ‘Icon Streams’ and ‘Past Icons Stream’ values.
Now you’ll need to recycle Explorer.exe by opening up task manager (You can use Ctrl+Shift+Esc), selecting explorer.exe in the list of processes and choosing End Process.
Now go to the File menu, choose New Task and type in explorer.exe into the open box. Hit enter, and explorer should restart itself. Depending on how many programs you run/install, you may have to repeat the process regularly.
Hope this helps!
thanx. It is accurate information.
Awesome, worked like a charm! (Although once I clicked End Process, my desktop went blank… Had to re-open/restart Task Manager again and just clicked New Task button.) Thanks for easy fix with no install!
I had an issue with my notification area where the icons I usually show in the taskbar were missing (not just shown without an image, I mean totally missing) and the icons in the notification area were almost all blank. I only had two or three icons that were still actually visible and they were scattered (not all lined up in a row – there were blanks between them…read on). For the rest, there were still other “slots” filled, but not the correct number of slots and no icon appeared in them – they were just “blank” icon slots. Then, every 15 seconds to 2 minutes I would have another blank icon or two appear in my notification area. If left alone, the notification area would swell to take up about half of the entire screen when expanded to view the icons inside. There was no tooltip when you hover the mouse over the blank icons, and moving your mouse across the blank icons would cause many of them to disappear when your mouse moved away from that blank icon. So by moving your mouse around in circles over the expanded notification area you could basically clear out all but a few of the blank icons…but the process never stopped. Even after wiping out most of the blank icons you would still rack up more of them over time – and at the same pace as before. None of them were click-able (with the left or right mouse buttons) but they all showed the shadow “hover” background when your mouse was over them. Truly strange. It always happened right from start-up so I removed what few programs I could from my start-up list (which I always keep very lean in the first place), I disabled a few non-essential services, and rebooted to see if it helped. Nothing changed.
My problem wasn’t like most of the taskbar/notification area icon problems I had found in search engine results while trying to find an answer to this. I read plenty of pages about people who had icons that were blank, but their icons were still functional (they had a tooltip, they were still responsive to left and right clicking, etc.)…and they had no infinitely recurring periodic creation of additional blank icons that would disappear when the mouse was moved across them. So none of those solutions seemed to be right for me. The symptoms my system were showing did not fit the mold. Google’s auto-suggestions in their search field lead me to believe that I am far from alone in this problem, but none of their search results actually described my situation.
Well, out of options, I tried this batch file solution anyway and BANG – I have my taskbar icons back where they should have been, my missing notification icons have returned, all icons are functional, and I have NO blank icons appearing.
This appears to have fixed the issue completely. I mention this here in case anyone else has the same symptoms my machine had. I want them to realize that this is still apparently a result of a corrupt icon db, though for me it showed very different signs than the classic symptoms most people experience with that type of error. Hopefully this narrative will become a beacon in Google’s search results to help people with this specific issue – because nothing else seems to be so far…
Thanks, I’ve been trying to get rid of a certain notification icon for a while and this finally did it.
Thank you SO much!
really useful. Thanks a lot
I downloaded the app and it was a txt file so I simply edited it to a bat file in Notepad and when I ran it and then checked the Notification Tray, it was clean as a whistle. It quickly began rebuiiding whatever icons it needed. Great tool.
Disregard my previous post – the file downloaded on my desktop…
but the program didn’t work – probably because I have Vista and the program is for Windows 7, right?
Any suggestions for removing the icon in the task bar for a program that’s been uninstalled?
Thanks!
Yes… the file we shared is for Windows 7 only. To remove a shortcut from the taskbar in Windows Vista, can’t you right click on it and select delete?
The link to this program is not downloading…..
Using Vista Home Edition 32 bit and Google Chrome – is it my system or the link?
On a completely different note a made a bit of a mess of my system – couldn’t uninstall program and I think I made things worse troubleshooting Windows Installer – any suggestions for a great Windows troubleshooting site would be appreciated – I’m stunned that I can’t seem to find a solution to that problem…..
And I came here because I have a task bar icon for a program that I uninstalled
I receive this screen message when I click on the above link……
@echo off
:: Notification Area Cleaner
:: (c) 2009 Hally Master hally_master (at) yahoo (dot) com
:: Provided by http://www.digitalcitizen.life
:: WARNING! This utility restarts your shell (Explorer.exe) and deletes your notification area icons
taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
reg delete “HKCUSoftwareClassesLocal SettingsSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionTrayNotify” /v IconStreams /f
reg delete “HKCUSoftwareClassesLocal SettingsSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionTrayNotify” /v PastIconsStream /f
start “Shell Restarter” /d “%systemroot%” /i /normal explorer.exe
Any suggestions greatly appreciated
An ABSOLUTE gem! Thanks for sharing.
I don’t know why I ended up with loads of MSI****.tmp files in the notification area preferences…bloody Windows. You helped save my day and sanity!
We’re glad we could help. 😀
Thank you! Worked great. This was worth something. Would have paid for it.
Thanks a lot for the small .bat program. Worked like charm.
Well, I ran it … but explorer never came back! I need to restart the computer. *sigh*
You can always restart explorer with [Windows Key]+[R], type “explorer”, [Return/Enter]
Worked like a charm – Hard to find utility programs like this for Win7 – works on both 32 and 64 bit. Had to run it from the desktop, hopefully Microsoft will include it in a future update.
Great
Been looking around for something like this, tried Tray Cleaner but it didn’t work then saw a link to this article at tinyhacker.com which worked like a charm, thanks guys this helped a lot.
Thanks for the comment. It is nice to see people find our work to be useful.