Brian's Blog

For those of us who are unfortunate enough to have to use Windows Vista for work this may be useful. One feature that is nice in Vista is that it can automagically group similar windows into a single spot on your taskbar. I don't know the exact number where it actually start grouping but it seems to be somewhere around 5 or 6 by default. For me this caused more clutter on the taskbar then I wanted. I wanted it to start grouping at around 3. Unfortunately this isn't as easy as it should be and requires a quick registry edit.

Here's how I did it:

1. Run Regedit.exe
2. In regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. Create a new DWORD key called TaskbarGroupSize
4. Assigned TaskbarGroupSize the value that you want it to start grouping at.

It seemed to not work at first when I did it but logging off and back in worked to have it re-read the registry settings.