How to get rid of ghost icons in the Windows 7 taskbar? The new taskbar in Windows 7 is awesome, but it has its quirks. One of them are ghost icons of pinned programs that won’t flush out. Luckily, there’s a fix for that. A revamped taskbar with Dock-like icons is one of the prominent user interface enhancements in Windows 7. It’s a crossover of OS X’s Dock and the Quick Launch area from Windows XP, but with much more functionality. When you run a program under Windows 7, its icon remains on the taskbar until you quit it.
Many people permanently affix (or “pin”) their favorite apps to the taskbar for easy launch (above). However, sometimes one or more pinned programs have a “ghost icon” on the taskbar instead of the real icon, like the ghost Safari icon that appeared on my taskbar the other day (below).
This often happens when you install a newer app version. For example, whenever I install a new version of Safari for Windows, the pinned icon belonging to the previous version becomes ghosted. IrfanView also suffers from the same problem. This is common for many apps that aren’t designed with Windows 7 specifics in mind. As a result, their installers are unaware that you have pinned the icon to the taskbar. Such installers simply remove a previous app version, but they don’t know how to update the pinned icon to point to an updated version – hence, Windows 7 can’t find the icon image because its corresponding application has been removed.
First, try either clicking on the taskbar or the ghost icon itself to flush it out. If that doesn’t help, right-click on the ghost icon in the taskbar and choose “Unpin this program from taskbar” from a drop-down menu. After that, launch the newer version of the program, wait until its icon appear in the taskbar, and pin it to the taskbar by choosing “Pin this program to taskbar” from a drop-down menu. In rare circumstances the aforementioned instructions won’t help you out – you’ll be unable to unpin the ghost icon or even bring up the right-click menu. Clicking the ghost icon would produce a dialog shown below.
People are reporting this issue on various Windows 7 builds. Many users note that re-installing or completely uninstalling the app in question yields no results. Luckily, there’s a solution for this issue, too. Open Windows Explorer, choose “Tools->Folder options…”, click on the View tab, select the “Show hidden files, folders, and drives” option and click on OK. Next, use Windows Explorer to navigate to the store for pinned items (replace USERNAME with your own Windows 7 account):
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
That folder has shortcuts to all the programs you have pinned to the taskbar. In my example, I located and deleted the Safari shortcut and its ghost icon immediately disappeared from the taskbar. If this doesn’t fix the issue, empty your trashcan and restart the system.
Tags: desktop, howto, issues, Microsoft, operating systems, Software, windows, Windows 7
