How to always hide the tray icon of an external program

[Angel]

Hi,

is there any way to always hide the tray icon of an external program? What I want to achieve is the same as if I manually opened the "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties", when to "Customize...", selected a certain program and made it "Always hide".

Normally you can do this manually and windows always remembers that settings, but there is an exception: Visual Studio 2005 macros.

I have made some Visual Studio macros to automate tasks in Visual Studio 2005. Every time that a macro is running an icon appears on the system tray, showing that a "macro is running". This is very annoying because some of my macros execute every time that a breakpoint is hit in visual studio, so the icon keeps appearing and disappearing from the system tray.

For some reason, if I disable the icon, it will remain disabled only until the next time that I start visual studio. It seems that visual studio deletes the "Always hide" setting to ensure that when a macro is running you always get that system tray icon.

Is there any way to work around that?

Help would be much appreciated! Thanks,

Angel

[MrCreatoR]

Hi,

Look at SysTray_UDF here.

[Angel]

MsCreatoR,

thanks for the answer. I tried it but it does not work.

What these functions do is hide an existing system tray icon. But if the application puts the icon in the system tray again, then it will appear again on the system try.

In my case, visual studio puts the icon on the system tray _every time_ that a visual studio macro is executed. So even if I remove the icon (by means of _SysTrayIconRemove), the icon will re-appear again later, which is exactly what I want to avoid.

I've found some information on the internet about how windows keeps the info about which icons to show and hide in the registry. It appears that there are two registry keys involved:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify\IconStreams

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify\LastIconStreams

These are REG_BINARY keys, and are very big. I tried to read them with RegRead from autoit but it fails. It gives and error code -2: "value type not supported" but the help file says that AutoIt supports REG_BINARY.

May this be because their values are too big?

What I think that must be done is to somehow change those values so that we can permanently hide the icons. My guess is that visual studio resets that value when it exits (or when it starts) to ensure that the macros tray icon is always shown.

So the question seems to be: How can I read and modify those registry values? Any ideas?

Angel

[MrCreatoR]

Size of a general string buffer is limited by 4095 kb.

I think here is the problem... but why RegRead set @error = -2 ?