How to permanently hide a hidden system tray icon in Windows 7?

I have a few applications that are left working in the background, and I rarely open them.

However, I don't want to display them on my system. The applications are set to 'Hide icons and notifications' within the notification settings, but they're visible with other inactive icons as you can see here.

I want to remove the icon from there as well so that the icon won't appear anymore, but that's also working in the background. How can I do this? Is there a solution or some kind of workaround?

Hi bbgun21-

The easiest way to avoid the icons is to run msconfig.exe and disable the programs in the Startup tab (if they're there).

wither 2 said:

Hi bbgun21-

The easiest way to avoid the icons is to run msconfig.exe and disable the programs in the Startup tab (if they're there).

Hi, wither.

This would, unfortunately, disable the program. What I'm looking for is to actually hide the icon from the system tray entirely, while the program is running in the background. Kind of like services do, except without the unnecessary front-end.

Is this possible?

That will only stop them from running in the background upon startup. You can still run them after startup. You said you rarely open them so I thought this approach would work. If a program requires a service that is in the Services tab and you disabled the service there, this approach wouldn't work.

There is an IconStreams entry for this in the registry but i don't know if it can be modified to do do what you want.

I also wonder if you could find the icon (.ico) associated with a program and either rename it or delete it.

Tray icons are entirely controled by the program that created those, not by Windows itself, and every program is fundamentally free to place its own icon(s) on the tray, so the first and simple answer is that what you want is not possible at all.

The first posibility is to use an option in the program in question to hide its own icon. This is a case-by-case option that might even not exist, but if it does, it's quite easy to remove icons as you want.

Some programs as you say just run in the backgroud, but they're actually implemented as services, with a small front-end showing the icon and some user interface. In such cases you can just close the front end and leave the service running and doing its job, without any user interface.
Some programs always run in this way while other can be setup to do so, so that's another thing to look out for.

Now for the real dirty options.

There are ways to run any program as a service. If the program doesn't requires user interaction, depending on what it does exactly, you can leave it running truly in the backgroud using srvany.exe or similar wrappers. Be sure to watch out for any side-effects, like running without an user being logged on, having a different home folder and a different set of permissions, or triggering the interactive service warnings.

You can try to run the program with low integrity. With this, the program will lose the permissions to interact with Windows Explorer, thus it'll be unable to put itself in the tray. Be ready to handle permissions problems if you go on this route.

You can run it with another user on another session, so it shows an icon..... on a completely different desktop. A clean solution, but inconvenient to use and again there can be permissions problems.