If you’d like to minimize your windows explorer, notepad and other applications to the System Tray instead of to the taskbar on your Windows PC, RBTray is a freeware that you want to check out.
Minimize applications to System Tray
Once you have downloaded and simply run the portable app RBTray.
To minimize any program to the System Tray (notification area) right-click the program’s Minimize button.
To restore it, click the program’s icon in the notification area.
To exit the app, right-click on any tray icon created by RBTray and click Exit RBTray in the popup menu.
If you want it to automatically start after you reboot, create a shortcut to RBTray.exe in your Start Menu folder.
It is quite a useful tool, and if you like it, you can download it from SourceForge.
See this post if you want to minimize windows & programs to your desktop as Thumbnails instead of as Taskbar Icons.
