How to disable Windows 7 taskbar hover list

Solution 1:

7+ Taskbar Tweaker can do that.

It's lightweight, it's powerful and you will never want to work without it anymore ;)

Another 7+TT's feature you may be interested in is the Combining section: you can disable window combining without enabling labels (as seen in the screenshot). One application's windows will still be grouped, but not combined:

Solution 2:

Here's a way to do it without installing any software:

According to Gokul T.'s answer in answers.microsoft.com, while you can disable the thumbnail previews, you can't disable the hover list completely; however, you can apply a delay so that it doesn't show up unless you leave the cursor there for a while. Here are the instructions:

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.

I tested this, and it seems to work.

Alternatively, if you don't feel like navigating around in the registry editor's interface, here's a script that should add the key with a delay of 10 seconds. Just copy the following to a text editor:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"ExtendedUIHoverTime"=dword:00002710

...and save it as a .reg file. You should then be able to double-click the file to automatically apply the changes in the registry. NOTE: I haven't tested this method, so I can't guarantee it works.