I've been tinkering Windows 11 since it's the very first leaked ISO, and like many others, I noticed the uncustomizable Taskbar. So I tried my own experiments to get some good things back to this newest Windows. I installed the latest build (22000.65) on my daily PC, that is actually "can't run Windows 11," because it's an old machine with AMD Phenom II X2 555 Processor. But I managed to do a clean install and most of the things run smoothly.
Now, for the taskbar, even if you changed "TaskbarGlomLevel" and "MMTaskbarGlomLevel" to 2, and changed "TaskbarSizeMove" to 1 in registry, the opened windows will always combine in Taskbar and the Taskbar itself can not be moved anywhere.
Now see this screenshot:
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As we can see, I'm running Windows 11 Build 22000.65 with ungrouped Taskbar. This is my PC details:
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How to do that? Here comes the most important thing:
- Copy "explorer.exe" from the previous build. Here I'm using one from Windows 10 Build 19041.964, can be seen here:
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- Now restart the PC to DOS (Command Prompt)
- Get to the directory C:\Windows, and rename the original "explorer.exe" to something else for backup. I did something like this:
-- C:\Windows ren explorer.exe exploder.exe
- Copy the new "explorer.exe" to that directory. Here is what I did:
-- C:\Windows copy D:\Files\explorer.exe (D:\Files is where you put the copied "explorer.exe" from Windows 10)
- Restart the computer, and you now have the customizable Taskbar with uncombined icons and show text, also it's movable and sizable.
Finished? Not yet. I don't know will this one happens to others or not, but in my case, I don't have clock, network icon, and volume icon after replacing explorer.exe. To bring them back, you have to do this:
- Press Win + R (Run Command), and run this: shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}
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It will bring the old systray icons dialog and you can choose which icon to show up at the bottom-right corner. Choose "Turn system icons on or off" to bring back volume, network, and clock icons.
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Here is the final look of my desktop now:
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WARNING: Don't delete the original "explorer.exe" in case something bad might happens. I tested this method to run on my PC for 24H and got no problem. Hopefully there will never be any problem.
Remember, keep this one for backup:
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