A small Windows tray watchdog that keeps your notification area icons exactly as visible or hidden as you set them — even after the owning app updates.
Windows defaults every tray icon to hidden, and treats "shown" as a fragile, temporary favor it's free to revoke. Explicitly tell it to show an icon and it'll usually honor that — until the owning app updates, at which point Windows silently reverts the icon to hidden with zero notification that it happened. You just eventually notice the icon is gone.
The mechanism behind it: Windows remembers each icon's visibility in the registry, keyed roughly by the icon's owning executable path. Any app whose install path changes on every update trips this — which, in practice, means most of them. The Xbox app is a good example everyone's probably got installed: it's a Microsoft Store (MSIX) package, and the entire package version is baked into its install path:
...\WindowsApps\Microsoft.GamingApp_2608.1001.17.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\XboxPcTray.exe
...\WindowsApps\Microsoft.GamingApp_2609.1002.4.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\XboxPcTray.exe
Electron/Squirrel-style auto-updaters (Discord, Slack, Claude Desktop, and plenty of others) have the same problem via a different pattern — each new version installs into its own app-x.y.z folder. Either way, every update changes the path, Windows treats the icon as brand new, and it silently defaults back to hidden — discarding a preference you explicitly set, with no notification that it happened.
TidyTray runs quietly in the tray and:
- Watches
HKCU\Control Panel\NotifyIconSettings(Explorer's own undocumented store for this) for changes, live — no polling delay, no Explorer restart needed. - Resolves each icon to a stable, human-readable identity (the exe's product/file description, falling back to tooltip or filename) so an app update doesn't fork your preference into a new entry.
- Automatically detects and separates genuinely distinct icons that happen to share a generic name (a number of Windows' own system tray icons all report the identical
ProductName, for example) — without splitting apart different versions of the same real app. - Re-applies your stored preference the moment it drifts, and remembers a sensible default (visible) the first time it ever sees a new icon.
- Gives you a simple checklist UI, opened from the tray icon, to set the preference for anything it has ever seen.
Windows 10/11. No .NET runtime installation needed — release builds are self-contained, single portable .exe files.
Download the latest TidyTray-*-win-x64.exe from the Releases page and run it — no installer, no admin rights, nothing else to set up.
Just run TidyTray.exe. It sits in the tray with no visible window. Double-click (or right-click → Settings) to open the checklist. Right-click → "Start with Windows" registers it to launch automatically at login (off by default — nothing is added to your startup sequence unless you turn it on yourself).
For development:
cd src/TidyTray
dotnet build
Releases are built and published automatically — pushing a v* tag triggers GitHub Actions to produce the portable single-file exe and attach it to a GitHub release, so there's normally no need to do this by hand. To reproduce that build locally anyway:
cd src/TidyTray
dotnet publish -c Release
Output lands in src/TidyTray/bin/Release/net10.0-windows/win-x64/publish/TidyTray.exe — a single self-contained executable, no installer required.
Writing a DWORD value named IsPromoted (1 = shown, 0/absent = hidden-in-overflow) to the relevant subkey under HKCU\Control Panel\NotifyIconSettings takes effect live, in both directions, confirmed by hand against both native and Electron-based apps — no Explorer restart required. This is undocumented behavior (there's no public Win32 API for it), so it's possible a future Windows build changes how it works.
MIT — see LICENSE.