I am quite OCD about my tray - most apps you can hide the tray icon, but on some you can't - is there any way to manually remove the icons?

Yes I could hide them, but that gives me a horrible triangle icon thing which I hate.

Can't you just Right click and press unpin from Task bar or doesn't that work for some of the icons?

Thats the Windows 7 replacement for Quick Launch (which i'm not using anyway).

I'm talking about the tray icons in the bottom right.

Well if you are using Windows 7, the only way I can see how you take the icons off is by either right clicking them and then clicking Exit or on the arrow that points upwards is by clicking that and then clicking customise.

Customise only works if you have "hide inactive icons" enabled, and I still want the programs to work - I just don't want to see the icon.

This is why I won't have Java, Quicktime and a few other things, installed on my machine. Applications that install tray icons that I can't right-click and exit completely have no place on my PC, period.

Stop QtTask from running on startup then - problem solved. It has no need to run 24/7 so kill it...

On Vista, enable the option to "Hide Inactive Icons", then press customize. There you can select if you want them to hide permenantly, when inactive or not to hide at all. Not sure if it is the same in Windows 7.

But I don't want to do that as i'm left with the ugly triangle icon...

I'm using XP and I get rid of mine by going to:-

Start -> Run -> type 'msconfig', then going into the startup tab and clicking on the 'Disable all' button.

I have never really felt the need for anything to load on startup apart from my anti-virus

Hope that helps.

I want the applications to load - but not to be showing, so that won't fix it...

Unless the preferences (not always on right click) have an option to turn off the try icon, then you are stuck with the "ugly triangle" or the icons showing.

You don't need to go to any preferences options on Windows 7, just click on the icon you want to hide, hold the mouse button and throw it anywhere else. If you move it to anywhere above the taskbar, it'll be automatically hidden (on the up arrow (aka "horrible triangle")). You can also move icons around to change the place they are on the screen, etc. Just click and move, like most things on W7.

I don't think it's possible to completely hide them (i.e.: no up arrow) though.