Clear Items History of Notification Area

The Notification area (or system tray) in the Windows taskbar displays the current time and icons that indicate the active status of various programs which are running right now. You can choose which items will show up in the notification area and which will never show up. The default is that only active programs get showed and if the program becomes inactive, it will go to the hidden list. You can use the small arrow key on the taskbar to show all the programs (active and inactive).

As time passes by, and the more programs we use, the more programs accumulate on the notification area. Even though we are not using all the programs at the same time but they get saved in the notification area tray history. You can customize which programs to show and which programs to hide by:
Right clicking the statusbar –> properties –> Customize.

Here you can customize your notification area. Now this list will contained all the programs which used the notification area. If you want to clear off this list, you can do the following:

• Open the registry editor by going to Start –> Run –> regedit.
• Find the following key:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify
• Delete IconStreams and PastIconsStream from the right hand pane. This will clear off the notification area history which Windows is maintaining.
• You need to restart Windows explorer or restart the computer for the changes to take effect.