File information panel removal in Explorer

Near the bottom of the page in the link below is a Registry Setting that supposedly will enable or disable explorer tooltips. I suggest backing up your registry first either via restore point or a registry backup program.

The page:
Disable ToolTips Windows 7 - Microsoft Community


The registry backup freeware I use:
Registry Backup

This backup is better than some because it uses Volume Shadow Copy so you can back up all registry hives even though Windows is running. Note that to restore with it you must boot into safe mode first.

Alejandro85 said:

It's quite easy to disable those, go to folder options (tools menu => options), then "view" tab, and untick the option "Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items", accept and they're gone. Restoring them is as simple as ticking that option again, if you ever want to.

RobC54 said:

When using Windows explorer if you hover the mouse over a file name a panel appears giving you details such as file size, location, date created etc, etc. I don't know what this is called.

Those small help popups are called tooltips, they're a very common way to provide help, not just in explorer, but in all sort of software.

There are tooltips provided by applications. For example you hover the mouse over a button on the program's Gui and it tells what happens if you push it. But there are tooltips that are explictly shell extensions to Explorer via COM. As example I wrote a program as a DLL called TipOff where you could put a comment on a file and when you hovered the mouse on the file in Explorer it displayed your comment in a tooltip.

The OP would have to try disabling the tooltip setting to find out if it is system wide or only the Explorer extension mechanism that gets disabled. If it is system wide just reset the value to the original.