Help systray help you

The windows taskbar has changed a lot over the years, and more so the start menu, but ever since Windows 95 brought me the System Tray, I've been glancing at the bottom right corner of my screen to see what's running.

Back in those days, if you closed a window, you closed the program.  Even the most ignorant user today probably knows that's not always the case anymore, but on the flip side, even the most savvy user is fighting a constant battle against monopoware that thinks it really ought to be running all the time.  A good interface includes the option to close, minimize, or minimize to system tray (notification area) when you hit the x.  Winamp and even (monopoware) iTunes are a couple of examples.  It's a great place for stuff that you like to keep running in the not-quite-background; you get more space for your foreground stuff in the taskbar.  It's not there to be a place for Skype and Steam to hide when you think you've closed them, though.  Or maybe you just don't care and you want to hide them all...

To the point:  Windows 7's system tray has that little arrow on the left side of the icons.  Click it and you'll find all those always-on programs, hit customize and you can set their behaviors.

An example of each of the three settings.

Now I know when Steam and Soluto are running on their own (the worst of these wares like iTunes and Skype will even reset this after some updates).  Now my antivirus and Windows update won't take up space on the bar unless I need to know something.