I am hosting Oracle VirtualBox 4.322 on Windows Server 2012. One of my virtual instances uses Windows Server 2008. I can't turn off the Taskbar Tooltips on the taskbar, so when I move my mouse anywhere near the taskbar, a stack of tooltips appear (one for each open instance, such as IE or Visual Studio) and block a good portion of the screen. In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog window, the "Use Areo Peek to preview the desktop" checkbox is grayed out.
Every suggestion I have found online is similar, and would probably work in Windows Server 2008 on a normal machine. But none of these suggestions work, and I am fairly certain it is because I am running in a virtual environment.
UPDATE: Found a similar screenshot online, as I can't post from stand-alone machine:
UPDATE: Here is a screenshot (again found online) showing the checkbox grayed out in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window:
Best Answer
It is quite unlikely that the problem is in any way related to the fact that you're running under a virtual machine. It's probably just that the other answers you found online are wrong. Lots of places online, for example, recommend editing the registry value
ShowInfoTip, which will work, but actually disables all tooltips. Sort of like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Lots of solutions also involve disabling the thumbnail previews of the application windows, giving you instead a list of names. This is what you already have, though, according to the screenshot, so it probably isn't what you want. There are a lot of little UIannoyancesfeatures in modern versions of Windows, and it's hard to tell online exactly which one someone is talking about.If there is some connection to your running in a VM, it must be that you have desktop composition disabled (because VMs rarely have good support for this). That doesn't bother me; I prefer the classic theme anyway. But this is why you aren't able to turn on Aero Peek—it requires composition to be enabled.
Anyway, I can think of a couple of different options for you here, each with their respective advantages and disadvantages.
1. Increase the delay time for these pop-ups.
You can edit the registry and change the value for the amount time your mouse must hover over the taskbar icon before the thumbnail previews are shown. If you make the value sufficiently high, this may be enough to eliminate the annoyance without sacrificing the usefulness of the feature in other cases. If you don't find the feature useful at all, ever, then that is of course a disadvantage of this approach. Another possible disadvantage is that you'll still see a tooltip. It will be a normal tooltip that contains only the title of the window, but if you have a very small screen, it may still cover up things.
To do this: open the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced. If it is not already there, add a new DWORD value namedExtendedUIHoverTime. Double-click on this value and enter a time in milliseconds. The default is 400 milliseconds. Pick something ridiculous, like 100 seconds (100000 ms). Restart the computer to ensure the change takes effect.2. Install 7+ Taskbar Tweaker.
You can also break out the big guns and install the free (gratis) 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. This allows you to tweak certain configuration options that can't be altered using via the registry. It injects a DLL into Explorer and hooks some messages behind the scenes to do its magic.
It has a lot of great options that make it worthwhile to me (like sane grouping settings), but the one you'll be most interested in is the "Hovering" options, in particular the "Nothing" option. ("Tooltip" will get you basically the same effect as approach #1 above.)
This works like a boss. The obvious disadvantage is that it requires installing third-party software. I can, however, speak from experience that it does not slow down your system in any noticeable way, and it has never caused any stability problems for me. Once you hide the icon in the notification center, you'll never even know it's there.