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Does anyone know where in registry the Explorer stores tray icons visibility settings? (Always show, show only notifications, or always hide.)
PS. I know that Microsoft doesn't want us to change these from a program, which may be OK for a home computer, but it becomes a major pain in the ___ for an enterprise environment (as there seems to be no GPO to do this either.) I've seen couple commercial products that were able to do this, so I'm sure there's a "hack" somewhere...
There is no interface for preventing your notification icon from being hidden http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/.../10105142.aspx and No, you can't ask whether your notification icon is visible or not http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/.../10157902.aspx.
Yes, I know that there's no "documented" way of doing it. What I guess, I'm looking for is a "hack". As I explained above there's no reason to block this option for an enterprise setting. I found a solution that modifies the system registry and restarts the explorer, I just need to put it in code to see if it works. From doing the research on this subject, I can also tell that this approach is used by some installers these days. One example is a Dropbox desktop client that obviously needs to show updates on file uploads/downloads without involving that hideous popup balloon.Quote:
Originally Posted by cilu
I understand that employing such a "hack" would be a violation of whatever rules Microsoft might have concocted in their MSDN, but to be honest with you, I don't think that hiding tray icons by default was such a good idea from the start. The way it should've been done from the get-go is that icons should've been always visible by default and a user should have an option to "always hide" any of them manually (without an API to undo such decision.)