I am running Windows XP Professional. I have the Taskbar appear at the bottom of the screen. Immediately to the right of the Start button are some icons. They appear to be controlled by the Quick Launch Toolbar (available by right-clicking on the Taskbar). The icons seem to change to different applications without any cause that I can determine. I only display three icons; is there any way to control which icons display, and to keep them from changing?
Also, there are a bunch of icons to the far right of the Taskbar. (Is this the System Tray?) Is there a way to control which icons display here?
As a rule, you can select which programs are on your Quick Launch bar. To add programs, just drag-and-drop the program shortcut from the Start menu. To delete, right-click the icon on the bar and select Delete. I don’t know of a way to lock that toolbar.
I dunno about the randomly changing shortcuts, that seems very odd. Are you sure you’re not accidentally dragging things to the toolbar? Does anyone else use your computer?
Those far-right icons are the System Tray, yes.
In the Taskbar properties (right-click the task bar & select Properties), there’s a checkbox for Hide inactive icons. There’s also a Customize button that will let you individually select what displays when. (This is all for XP Pro, not sure about other versions.)
If you have things showing up that you don’t want, you might also look at keeping them from running automatically, rather than just hiding the icons. That will improve performance a bit. At least for me, there’s a lot of crap that starts automatically that I don’t use often, so I try to disable as much of it as possible.
[ Start ] : Quick Launch Area : Application Windows : Language Bar : System Tray / Clock
Quick Launch and Language Bar are optional; I only use Quick Launch, much like mos others.
There isn’t really any way to control which icons are displayed in the system tray unless the applications that live there provide a way to hide their icon. You can set the Windows task bar to hide the system tray icons (except the clock) such that instead of displaying everything verbatim, it will sort of slide the application window bar over to the right to cover the systray items and provide a little arrow you can click on to reveal them when you need to access them. I don’t use this myself because some of my systray items provide brief but valuable information as to what they’re doing at any given moment that I like to be able to keep an eye on without having to click anything.
As to the mysteriously changing quick launch items, two things.
Right-click an empty area of the task bar (i.e. an area that is not currently occupied by a an application window button or quick launch item.) Is “Lock the Taskbar” checked? If so, uncheck it. A dotted handle will appear to the right of the quick launch area which you can slide left and right to reveal/hide the quick launch icons. Slide it to the right to reveal all quick launch items. Are the ones you want listed in there? Are there others you don’t want? You can right-click and delete unneeded icons and then resize the quick launch area to whatever size you want to keep it at. You can also re-check “Lock the Taskbar” if you find that sort of thing useful.
When you install a program that, upon the initial installation setup, gives you the option to create a desktop icon, start menu group and/or and quick launch items, are you leaving “Create quick launch icon” checked? If so, uncheck it unless you want it to appear in the quick launch area. Otherwise your quick launch tray will become cluttered with stuff you don’t need or want.