Taskbar thumbnail wont turn off

Ive tried everthing. Enabled the setting in gpedit.msc. Turned off the preview in taskbar properties. I still get those thumbnail previews.

Any idea how to fix this?

Im on build 7100.

Hello Blindkilla, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Sorry, but the ability to turn off the taskbar thumbnails has been disabled in Windows 7.

Shawn

Brink said:

Hello Blindkilla, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Sorry, but the ability to turn off the taskbar thumbnails has been disabled in Windows 7.

Shawn

Click to expand...

Ah that sucks, i wonder why they did that , these previews are very annoying.

Not sure why. The only workaround I have found so far would be to use the Windows Classic theme instead, but that is not a very acceptable option.

Brink said:

Not sure why. The only workaround I have found so far would be to use the Windows Classic theme instead, but that is not a very acceptable option.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that or windows 7 basic theme, but there are some graphical issues when using that one for me since i use chrome.

ok guys.. i was really upset when i saw that they did remove the abillity to disable that preview thumbnails (its vista only in gpedit.msc now). so i was going to code something with window hooks or timer based code to hide that previews. i do usually click really fast around and they are always over a window i do need and so its really annoying for me.

of course i know that you can set the

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\MouseHoverTime

to make em faster and i did because it does also speedup the startmenu. but this makes it even worser and setting this higher makes the startmenu slow.

because i wanted to hide the windows in the beginning, i found out that i can temporary disable em with FindWindowEx and classnames TaskListThumbnailWnd and TaskListOverlayWnd. but when i sent WM_CLOSE to the window - it disapeared but gave me a flicker in some appliations when hovering the taskbar (outlook or ultraedit for example)

then i thought about to do a memorypatch with WriteMemory or a hook and for that reason i had some look into explorer.exe and i found some interesting reg values:

ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime
DisablePreviewWindow
ExtendedUIHoverTime

so i did try some stuff and the first both values dont do anything or i did do a mistake. BUT the ExtendedUIHoverTime saved my life!! this value does modify the hovertime of the previews itself and not the overall windows mouse hover time!!! so if you set that value very high, the taskbar preview do only appear after a looooooong time and in my case never show up as i dont hover that long on the taskbar.

here is the full setting:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
ExtendedUIHoverTime DWORD 20000 (dec)

this is what im using and it does work perfect. it does not disable the previews but delay em long enough!! of course you need to logoff/logon or kill and restart explorer.exe to get it work.

enjoy!
c.kolbicz

ok i got more information about the other reg values and wanted to share em here

DisablePreviewWindow DWORD 1 or 0

normally if you hoover a taskbar preview thumbnail window the other windows are getting transparent and only the big version of the thumbnail is shown on the desktop. set this to 1 to disable this feature.

ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime DWORD 0-?

this is the timeout to make other windows transparent when a tasbar preview thumbnail is hovered. you can make it really fast by setting to 0

enjoy!
c.kolbicz

cko said:

ok i got more information about the other reg values and wanted to share em here

DisablePreviewWindow DWORD 1 or 0

normally if you hoover a taskbar preview thumbnail window the other windows are getting transparent and only the big version of the thumbnail is shown on the desktop. set this to 1 to disable this feature.

ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime DWORD 0-?

this is the timeout to make other windows transparent when a tasbar preview thumbnail is hovered. you can make it really fast by setting to 0

enjoy!
c.kolbicz

Click to expand...

What is the full path for these?

ah sorry.. its the same one

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

i dont have these entrys by default, should i create them?

yes. these are not even documented yet and by default not present but you can create em as descibed

Hi All,
I turned off Task Thumbnail using gpedit and also edited registry entry as you people said.But Nothing changes.Any idea on this?
Thanks,
Krish

Hello Krish, and welcome to Seven Forums.

The ability to turn off Taskbar thumbnail previews has been disabled in Windows 7. It is permantently turned on now.

Sorry,
Shawn

UPDATE:
You can now disable taskbar thumbnail previews.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52265-taskbar-thumbnail-previews-enable-disable.html

Hi Shawn,
Thanks for your reply.
GPEdit setting corresponding to Preview should not be there..Right?I feel there is no meaning in keeping it in GPEdit.
Regards,
Krish

Krish,

I'm not certain why they left it in gpedit since it no longer works, but it's not the only one in there that does not work anymore though.

Maybe they will be gone by the final release.

This isn't quite solved yet. While setting ExtendedUIHoverTime high enough keeps them from appearing during a regular rollover, they still appear at times for me.

For example: Drag a task around the taskbar a little bit and then release it. With your mouse still on it, click it and then move your mouse. The thumbnail will appear again.

I want these damned things GONE! Like we had in Vista. Why does MS insist on removing useful options like this? I'll run a modified Explorer.exe if I have to, I just don't know where to look to disable these.

cko said:

yes. these are not even documented yet and by default not present but you can create em as descibed

Click to expand...

Thanks for these settings. I use RocketDock just above that taskbar and those thumbnails blocking everything and stuff going transparent was driving me mad!!

What an annoyance this is, I cannot fathom why Microsoft will not allow users to turn this junk off. Adjusting MouseHoverTime is hardly a solution. Tried RocketDock but not really a good solution either. I just cut to the crunch and switched to a non-aero theme, makes Windows 7 incredibly boring looking but that's the way Microsoft wants it to be. So much for looking after users who've been with them since day one. A hundred thumbs down to this single most annoying feature of Win 7.

Switching to a non-aero theme helped somewhat but now I wish I could do away with program grouping altogether, What I'd like to see is one icon on the taskbar for an application regardless of how many windows it has open. I switch between apps plenty and these groupings are a royal pain indeed.

Windows 7 on a non-aero theme is quite drab I must say. It's also interesting to see how many application developers have become reliant on Aero. The new CS5 does a few strange things with aero turned off. Either way, with a non-aero theme my experience is somehwat less frustrating than before, at least all the taskbar thumbnails are gone.

Going to spend a bit of time tonight looking at some shell replacements to see if I can get rid of program groupings altogether. Anyone know of anything good?

Just to feedback, I downloaded ObjectDock and it's just what I been looking for, no more taskbar thumbnails and no more program groupings.