In Windows 11 there seem to be no (standard/user-friendly) way to set the option of always showing all the tray icons (Taskbar corner overflow, as it is now called in Settings). It only allows you to toggle them one by one:

Obviously, that is far from ideal.

Is there another way to make all the tray icons to be always visible, so none are hidden, as it was possible to do in Windows 10 and older versions? Perhaps, there is a Registry key that controls this, or a "hidden" shell command to open the "old" settings dialog?

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3 Answers

Here is a workaround :

• Click the Start or Search icon in the Taskbar
• Type cmd, right-click on Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator
• Copy and paste the following: explorer shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}
• Press Enter
• Select "Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar"
• Click OK

If the checkbox "Always show all icons ..." is greyed out, I'm not totally sure what fixed it yet but it appears that changing the EnableAutoTray value in the Regedit helped.

To do so, open Regedit, go here:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]

Then set EnableAutoTray to 1

It seems this needs to be done on every boot so you could create a shortcut on your Desktop using right-click, New, Shortcut and use the command above.

Update : at first, I did not like the idea of selecting each app individually using Personalization -> Taskbar -> "Taskbar corner overflow", but in the end, it's not that bad. Whenever there is a new application installed that goes in the overflow, you can use the Personalization setting to add it. It's bit annoying but it works.

Update 2022 : please see comment from Grx70 below, as he wrote : you can drag and drop the icons that are overflowing by selecting them from the popup and moving them onto the tray bar

6

My Checkbox for show all was unusable, here's what got it for me on a Windows 10 Home > 11 Home upgrade machine.

Open Regedit, go here:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]

Look for EnableAutoTray and set the value from 0 to 1

Then run this cmd:

explorer shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}

The check box for showing all items should be interactable.

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This solved my problem:

explorer shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9} 

Hiding the icons by default is no good.

When an application from a hacker appears on the screen, the default is to hide it? That's not good at all. This means hackers can get away with running things on your computer without you knowing about it, put it back on there with Windows 11 Service Pack 1 as your first patch included.

So if you first go into the registry and try to add this entry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]
"EnableAutoTray"=dword:00000000

it does not work.

However, then, this next command won't work until you remove that registry entry:

explorer shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}

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