Stop the Annoying "There are unused icons on your desktop" Popup Balloon

By Lowell Heddings on January 28th, 2008

One of the most irritating “features” in Windows XP is the popup balloon dialog that tells you to clean your desktop. I booted up an old virtual machine a few minutes ago and encountered it again, so I decided to write up how to turn it off.

Annoying…

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Right-click on the desktop and choose Properties, and then the Desktop tab, and then the Customize Desktop icon.

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Now just uncheck the box for “Run Annoying Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days”

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Just one example of a balloon I don’t want in my perfectly windy sky.

Lowell Heddings, better known online as the How-To Geek, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on if you'd like.

  • Published 01/28/08
DID YOU KNOW?

The five interlocked rings that serve as the symbol of the Olympic Games represent the union of the “five continents” of the world (with no continent being represented by any specific ring).

Before 1951 though, each ring color corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania, and red for the Americas.

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