How To Hide Unwanted Control Panel Icons in Vista

You can hide certain types of icons in Control Panel's Classic View with a quick Registry hack. Just open the Registry Editor, and expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\don't load\.

Then, create a new string value for each icon you want to hide. For the name, type the filename of the .cpl file responsible for the icon. Then, double-click the new value, type No for its data, and click OK.

Refresh the Control Panel window by pressing the F5 key to see the change.

Now, there's a bug in Windows Vista that can crash Control Panel - or at least cause it to take a long time to load all its icons - if there's an errant entry in the don't load Registry key. Delete all the values in the don't load key and then try again.

Tags: crash,regedit,control panel

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