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I'm making a custom desktop for myself with Rainmeter. I've got everything else done up in some simple rainmeter skins, it was all fairly simple really.

But I'm getting quite stuck at this point. When I ended the explorer.exe task, I expected programs to minimize and just disappear, so I'd have to use alt-tab to get them back. And I was just gonna make another skin to manage minimized programs. It was gonna be great, beautiful. I was gonna reap the karma from having such a brilliant desktop.

But when I minimized some programs, they didn't disappear. They just minimized to the bottom left of the screen, stacking horizontally. They just show the three buttons for open/maximize/close and look REALLY ugly. How can I get around this? I want the programs to just disappear when I minimize them. I've tried googling, but nothing's really helping..

Xantoxu
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3 Answers3

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Don't kill explorer.exe.

It's your shell and it's needed for your system to work correctly. It doesn't only show the taskbar. It's also providing Windows Explorer and many other system components. explorer.exe (or some other shell) is required for Windows to operate normally.

If you want to hide the taskbar, right-click it and choose Properties, then select Auto-hide taskbar.

If you want to hide the taskbar permanently (and hurt your productivity for the sake of, uh...?),

Community
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gronostaj
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Use a program that can capture the tasks just like Explorer does, such as RocketDock or others.

Windows keeps all open programs in the bottom left, and explorer just hides these and places a reference in our taskbar. This can be done using programming and windows API calls. I even done something like this once in visual Basic 5 when I was much younger.

Any shell application will do this too, so you might want to look into an alternative shell, or just keep the Explorer and hide the taskbar. Note that the desktop shortcut icons and the right-click menu is also part of the explorer.exe process.

LPChip
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I managed to get it working, thanks to a helpful person over at Reddit who recommended I check out bblean.

For anybody in the future also having this problem, bblean is absolutely fantastic. https://app.box.com/s/7xxec65375msrwz4ni6x

It's kinda discontinued at this point, but it's open source. http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/files/

So I've managed to COMPLETELY remove explorer.exe from my desktop, and brought my memory usage from 40% down to 20%. That's absolutely fantastic, in my opinion.

Xantoxu
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