Windows 8 stuck taskbar button

When I first got Windows 8 a year ago, I was assured by the developer that the dead taskbar button in Windows 8 would vanish by itself. This turned out to be true, but having booted my PC after a power cut the other day, this has stopped being true.

The taskbar button just won't go away — it just sits there for days on end.

I've just spent ages going through a load of options. The first time I set the program shortcut to open minimised, that worked, so I went to see if I could feed that into my scheduled task that starts the program elevated (so that it works with Task Manager etc).

Every attempt since has failed. I've tried the shortcut again, and I've tried start /min at the command line, and neither works. I did manage to *close* the window from an AutoHotkey script but AutoHotkey's Run hide doesn't hide the window, nor does any attempt to use WinClose, WinMinimize, WinKill, forcing WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW onto the window etc. Every "solution" seems to work just once and die, or do nothing at all. (AutoHotkey seems to sometimes find the window, but then can't find it any more.)

Windows 8 is over a year old now! I can't believe that there's still no fix for this bug.

What exactly do I have to do to get rid of this useless button on my taskbar?

If the program is run in XP SP3 compatibility mode, it seems to work fine, including being permitted to interact with elevated/high integrity windows, but you get a UAC-like prompt when opening it, and I have my doubts about wanting to run it in this way. Switch off XP SP3 compatibility, kill it, and run it again and the taskbar button is back.

huh. The stupid icon has finally disappeared for now.

Make a minimize gesture and use it on the button.

4 years ago!

my solution: compatible mode -> windows xp (serivce pack 3)

sorry, my solution is available when mintotray pulgin does not work.

Just to repeat once more:

(1) StrokeIt works fine on Windows 8.1 OOTB.

(2) You can make the taskbar icon go away by assigning a gesture to "minimize" and performing that gesture on the taskbar icon itself. This only needs to be done after the program has been restarted.

Hi,
what you suggests works, but it's not a real solution :)

Solution is that Stroke it will start minimized in notification area (as it did in previous versions of windows).

I'm sure it's not that hard to implement a fix (at least a nasty fix like calling minimize event 5 seconds after start).