Hi, I would like to disable the display of the Windows Store icon on the taskbar as described above, but I would like to do it programmatically as part of an install/configuration process. Does anyone know how to do that for Windows 8.1? Perhaps by adding/modifying a registry key?
Thanks

You are right. My title and first para was wrong. I have edited the text and removed the ‘s’ from the title to make it: Do not allow pinning of Windows Store app to the Taskbar using Group Policy in Windows 8.1.

Thank you for pointing this out.

Some background: with Windows 8.1 Update 1, Microsoft starting forcing the Windows Store app to be automatically pinned to a user’s taskbar by default. The user can get rid of it, of course, but it was there by default for any new users.

This is not too bad in many environments, but if you want to control the icon and work in an environment where users are constantly switching computers, having the Windows Store icon automatically pinned to the taskbar can be a pain. In fact, there was such an uproar back in April about this that Microsoft decided to introduce the GPO mentioned in this article. Here is one of the Microsoft articles showing some history:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2014/09/09/managing-the-store-app-pin-to-the-taskbar-added-in-the-windows-8-1-update.aspx