How do you disable miniature pop-up windows when hovering over icons in taskbar?

I do not understand "If the above method doesn’t help". Are not all settings in group policy editor truthful?

You wrote "I do not understand "If the above method doesn't help". Are not all settings in group policy editor truthful?"

If your purpose is to try to understand all the peculiarities of Windows, I cannot help you.

If your purpose is simply to disable the miniature pop-up windows when hovering over icons in the taskbar in Windows 7, I can share the solution with you. This solution was presented by Jean_957 on November 3, 2013 (p 4 of this thread).

Download the Utility "7 + Taskbar Tweaker" from http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

When you run this utility, you have the option, under "Hovering" in the LH column, to select "Nothing". This choice disables those annoying miniature pop-up windows in Windows 7.

Note that the miniature pop-up windows are disabled only when the utility is running, so to make it effective, you should add it to your start menu and keep it running in the background. (7 + Taskbar Tweaker also has other helpful options.)

If you open 7 + Taskbar Tweaker to inspect or adjust the settings, you can close the window using "x" and it will be minimized to the try but continue to run ("x" will not close the program).

I have been using this for years on all my Windows 7 systems and it is a complete and definitive solution to the problem.

I have not found any other putative solution offered on this thread to be at all helpful and I do not recommend dedicating your time and energy to them.

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Method 1:

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Method 2:

If the above method doesn’t help, you may try the below steps:

You can disable the taskbar thumbnail feature (sort of) in Windows 7 using a registry edit. This can be done by setting the taskbar thumbnail preview hover delay to a large value (say 10000 milliseconds or more), so that the preview is not immediately generated when you hover over a taskbar icon.

1. Click Start, type regedit.exe and press ENTER
2. Navigate to the following location:

   

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced

3. Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named ExtendedUIHoverTime
4. Double-click ExtendedUIHoverTime and click Decimal
5. To increase the hover delay to 5 seconds, type 5000 . Type 10000 for 10 seconds and so forth…
6. Exit the Registry Editor.
7. Restart your computer.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up registry, refer the link below:

Backup the registryhttp://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Back-up-the-registry

Hope this helps!

Gokul – Microsoft Support

I made a discovery that may save readers a ton of trouble.

Suppose you save the registry settings above to a file (call it: 'set taskbar pop-up hover time to 10 seconds.reg') that contains the following contents:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]

"ExtendedUIHoverTime"=dword:00002710

so that you can run it in the event that you reinstall Windows. What can go wrong? Well, nothing if you run 'set taskbar pop-up hover time to 10 seconds.reg' from the Windows Run line -- it will create the registry key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced' as expected. But if you run it from a file-system utility (like WindowsCommander) that Windows thinks is a 32-bit application, then the registry key created is 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE*Wow6432Node*\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Advanced', and it will not work.

Bottom line: If you think you've set 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Advanced' to the key:value pair you want, but it doesn't seem to work, check here: 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Advanced'.

"You can disable the taskbar thumbnail feature (sort of) in Windows 7 using a registry edit."

We know this.

But we also know, thanks to a contribution from several years back (which I believe now shows up in the very first contribution on the page), that you can disable the taskbar thumbnail feature in Windows 7 NOT sort of, but completely, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker which you can find for free at

http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

It's a lightweight utility which you can put on your startup list. You need to keep it running in the background to maintain the effect. I have used it for years and it completely solves the problem.