How to clear the list of "Notification Area Icons" in Windows 7?

Question

I can't seem to find a way to clear the list of "Notification Area Icons" in Windows 7. Unfortunately I had installed a download manager (GetRight) which by default creates a tray icon for each download. I quickly disabled this but still have a ton of entries in that menu and it's annoying.

I found an article that had me navigate to this key in the registry...

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

delete IconStreams and PastIconStreams, then restart, but it did not clear the list.

Any ideas on this one?

Solution

Glad to hear you solved your problem. If, in the future, you'd like a less cumbersome method of doing that, you could grab CCleaner.

Aside from being an extremely handy Disk-Cleanup-on-steroids application, it has the option to easily wipe those out too -- under the Advanced group, tick "Tray Notifications Cache" and then hit "Run Cleaner". You'll still have to restart explorer.exe, but it is a bit quicker than circumnavigating the Registry. :)