A few days back I covered a tool called Tray Cleaner that allowed users to remove all past notification area icons, but sadly there was some trouble using it in Windows 7. It did not remove the icons completely. So today I am going to share with you another method that has been tested to work.

This method will require us to edit the registry. Go to Start, type Regedit and hit Enter. This will take you to Registry Editor, now navigate to the following key from the left sidebar:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

From the main window, delete both IconStreams and PasteIconsStream.

Now hit Ctrl +Alt + Del to open Task Manager and kill explorer.exe process. Once done, go to File > Run, enter explorer.exe and hit Enter, this will start explorer.exe again.

Now right-click the clock in the system tray and hit Customize notification icons. You will see that all past icons have now been removed.

For those who don’t know what are past notifications? Go here to learn about it. Enjoy!

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