Clean Up Past Notification Icons in Vista

The default behavior of both Vista and XP is to hide icons in the notification area (also called "system tray") when they're not actively conveying useful information. That helps you spot the icons that do have meaning. Every icon that ever shows up in the notification area gets recorded by Windows, and the user can dig into system settings to specify a different behavior from the default - to always show or always hide the icon. There's no real necessity to clean up the list of past icons unless it's somehow causing a problem (or unless you want to hide the fact that a specific program was ever installed). But if you want to completely reset the list of known icons you can do it by deleting two Registry keys. In Windows XP you'd navigate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\­Software\­Microsoft\­Windows\­CurrentVersion\­Explorer\­TrayNotify

and then delete the values named IconStreams and PastIconStreams. For whatever reason Microsoft moved these values to a more obscure location in Vista. Vista users will find them in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\­Software\­Classes\­Local Settings\­Software\­Microsoft\­Windows\­CurrentVersion\­TrayNotify.

This is an odd side-branch in the Registry without much data, but it definitely does contain the IconStreams and PastIconStreams values.