How can I disable flashing icons on Windows 7 taskbar?

I set my Windows 7 taskbar to auto-hide. However, sometimes when a program changes or something new happens in a program, the taskbar will show its self, and its respective taskbar icon will begin flashing orange.

Here's what I'm talking about:

enter image description here

To make the taskbar hide again, I have click on the program before I can go back to what I was doing.

Anyways, I personally find this very annoying, and would love to find a way to either:

Prevent the taskbar from having such alerts.
Prevent the taskbar from showing its self when it has such alerts.

I've searched around quite a bit, and really only found answers to this for XP.

I've also found another Stack Exchange Question looking for the same thing for Windows 7. However, none of the answers to the question were really what I'm looking for. I'm not looking to hide the taskbar, or control the number of flashes.

However, this answer seems to be what I'm looking for, so I downloaded and tried out the program. It works perfectly, other than the fact that the start menu icon is always shown, regardless of the taskbar being set to auto-hide.

So, any ideas on how to fix this problem?

Jeff Gortmaker

Posted 2011-07-29T22:21:11.993

Reputation: 915

Answers

Steps to disable flashing icon on Taskbar - Windows 7

Click the Start icon
Type in regedit
Select regedit from the top of the result
Go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Editing ForegroundFlashCount
1. Find ForegroundFlashCount
2. Double click ForegroundFlashCount
3. Replace the value for Value Data with 1
Editing ForegroundLockTimeout
1. Find ForegroundLockTimeout
2. Double click ForegroundLockTimeout
3. Replace the value for Value Data with 0
Reboot

This is the way to do it without any 3rd-party applications. The steps are in detail steps to help both experienced and non-experienced users. If you want to undo these changes, repeat the steps above using the original values: ForegroundFlashCount is 7; ForegroundLockTimeout is 30d40.

Disclaimer : You should always backup your registry before editing your registry.

SgtOJ

Posted 2011-07-29T22:21:11.993

Reputation: 6 843

3@PaulyGlott For values less than or equal to 9, it does not matter. If you were to revert to the original values, you would have to use Hexadecimal for the ForegroundLockTimeout value (30d40). – Andrew Morton – 2014-06-27T17:39:44.540

You actually do not need to reboot, changes should appear immediately. – sandric – 2017-10-25T20:38:22.243

Doesn't work for me either. I'll remove my downvote if you fix this. – Adam Arold – 2018-07-17T20:46:07.053

3Doesn't work for me too, on Windows 10 – Eugen – 2019-05-21T12:08:01.110

2ForegroundLockTimeout was already 0 before I touched it – MarcH – 2013-09-04T12:38:25.203

9Didn't work for me, after changing these settings the default behavior persisted. – ChimneyImp – 2013-09-19T15:23:16.743

In each DWORD dialog, do we leave Base as Hexadecimal or Decimal? – Chris Schiffhauer – 2013-10-23T16:46:09.120

-3

Try the free option given above. If it doesn't work, TuneUp Utilities 2011 has a feature to disable this:

enter image description here

It's not free, but they have a 15 day trial (so you can ensure it does work).

TookTheRook

Posted 2011-07-29T22:21:11.993

Reputation: 3 127

All this tool does is set the registry keys mentioned in the top answer. So what's the point? – Der Hochstapler – 2018-09-28T11:10:38.747

I just tried out this program. Unfortunately, after using this setting and restarting my computer, the flashing still exists: http://i.imgur.com/d2g63.png

– Jeff Gortmaker – 2011-07-29T23:13:36.200