Windows 7: Spacing between taskbar items and also system tray spacing

I'm using small icons and never combine and also 7 taskbar tweaker not to group tasks. I was wondering if there was a way to get rid of the space between tasks, like between one folder and another. Which is technically what grouping does I guess. But I still wanted to move individual things around and keep a certain order.

I also wanted to ask about reducing the spacing between icons in the system tray also. It uses two or three times the space as the tray from vista or any previous versions do. I know you can hide ones you don't use much and other options. But I wanted to leave it showing them all but just have them right next to eachother instead of spaces between.

(At this rate I'm going to have a thread starting record.)

No. There's no practical advantage to doing so (especially in non-combine modes) because you wouldn't actually save enough space to include an additional icon so it's not an option. I never used Vista so I don't know but I suspect that the spacing was not that much different.

And, no (I'm only 99% certain about this one though so I may be contradicted). If it takes up more space (and I'm not even sure that that's not just an optical delusion) it's because of the size of the icons. Although it may appear spaced out there is only minimal space between the icons taking into account the full size of the transparent parts.

You can have them closer together on the taskbar but you would need to edit the msstyles to do it.

Yeah, I suppose the spacing between taskbar icons may actually be about the same or pretty close like vista. It might just be a bit of design in the space in vista that isn't in windows 7. But spacing between the sytem tray icons definitely makes it twice as wide as vista since there wasn't any spacing really in vista.