How to disable the system tray?

I use the system tray items frequently, but some folks don't, and want a more minimalist look for their taskbars. If you're all about simplifying the look and don't want to be bothered with all those icons in the notification area, there's a registry edit that you can do to get rid of it.

1. Open your favorite registry editor and navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer
2. Click an empty space in the right pane and choose New DWORD Value
3. Right click the new value to rename it to NoTrayItemDisplay
4. Double click the new value and set the value to 1
5. Log off and log back on for the change to take effect

Note that this disables the system tray for your user account only, and it doesn't keep the applications in the tray from running - it just keeps their icons from being displayed there. You can get the tray back by changing the value to 0.