I needed to do this today, after refreshing my Firefox install. The icon on the taskbar still worked, but obviously wasn’t behaving properly. So I opened Firefox from the desktop shortcut, pinned the new icon, then tried to delete the old one. No right click menu.
So I googled, as you do, and found various solutions. A lot of sites, including Microsoft themselves, provided command line instructions that deleted ALL the pinned icons. I thought, surely that’s a bit drastic. Found other fixes too, but they either weren’t explained very well, or didn’t make any sense at all.
So I devised a method based on all the posts I’ve read, but which is basically a refinement of this solution from Microsoft. It may not work for you. But hopefully it will. It did for me.
- Navigate to C:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Lauch\User Pinned\Taskbar. (Your AppData folder is a hidden folder, so if you don’t usually have hidden items visible, go to your User folder, then add \AppData to the end of the contents of the address bar.)
- In that list, find the shortcut that corresponds to the icon on the taskbar you want to get rid of and delete it. It may vanish at this point. Mine didn’t. If yours doesn’t either, carry on with these instructions.
- Start Task Manager
- Go to the Processes tab.
- Find ‘explorer.exe’ and End Process. Don’t panic when your taskbar disappears.
- Go to the Applications tab.
- Click on “New Task…” at the bottom right.
- Type explorer.exe and click OK.
- Taskbar should come back, hopefully minus the unwanted icon.
Hopefully this has solved your problem. If not, you could try the Microsoft solution I refined to make this work. But you’ll have to repin all the apps you want if you do that. I just thought that was a bit of overkill for one icon 😀
