Closing all programs in system tray

[Alex]

How do I close all those programs that keep running in the background (those which appear in the system tray)? I find it particularly tedious to right-click over their icons and choose "exit" or "close", one by one...

I'd like to close them all with a single click (well, two clicks is okay ). There was a program called EndItAll that could do that trick in my old Win98, but now I have WinXP and that program apparently doesn't work anymore.

Any ideas?

(And don't say "don't load those programs when starting Windows", I actually use all of them -- well, most of them. )

[Urban Ranger]

You could always use msconfig.

[Alex]

hm, yes, but this means that I'd have to disable these programs permanently from loading at start, and I don't want to do it, because I need some of them. but thanks for the suggestion anyway.

[Zopperoni]

What's more trouble to you?

1) Having everything load with Windows, and close what you don't need?; or

2) Have nothing load with Windows, and start what you need?

[Alex]

interesting question, zop, and the option (2) would be the real answer for me, but I usually disable all programs running in the background in order to play games, and considering that my comp is a horrible piece of junk I pretty much have to do this (close programs) in order to not steal resources from the games I want to play.

I need to disable *all* of them, including firewall and antivirus (well, I could exclude the antivirus, because its right-click menu only allows me to "disable" it, not to close it). I don't want to be without these programs when I start Windows, and don't want to manually start them one by one, it would be as much of a chore as it is closing them.

[Urban Ranger]

Well, since you are using XP, you can always create two accounts, one with all the system tray programs and one without. Just switch to the other one when you want to play a game.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Well, since you are using XP, you can always create two accounts, one with all the system tray programs and one without. Just switch to the other one when you want to play a game.

That's a damn good idea.

[Alex]

really good idea, UR. thanx. i'll try that.

[Urban Ranger]

How did it go?