Steve Hwang

A: If you minimise a standard application, it takes up a good chunk of space on the taskbar and is easy to access with the <Alt>-<Tab> key combination. But if you minimise a system tray app, the only way to restore it is to double-click that tiny icon in the tray. This is an inconvenient approach for most programs, but it's handy for something that you want running but out of the way.

To make a program load into the system tray even if it wasn't designed to go there, use Idyle Software's Tray Minimizer. You can download a trial version of this $US13 shareware program from www.idyle.com. Tray Minimizer offers a number of ways to place a program in the tray (see FIGURE 1).

You can drag a program to the Tray Minimizer icon on the desktop, or you can make 'Tray Minimize' an option when you right-click an .exe file. The best method, however, is to use the Tray Minimizer Control Center to create a special shortcut that launches your program into the tray.

When the tray-minimized program is running, it behaves normally: It's visible on the taskbar and on the <Alt>-<Tab> list. But when you minimise it, it disappears from everywhere but the tray.

The program isn't perfectùgetting it to hide Outlook 97 properly was trickyùbut it worked just fine with most programs I tried.