Skip to content

Configuration

EliteSoftware - Zach edited this page Jul 5, 2026 · 1 revision

Configuration & Settings

Elite-TaskBar is highly customizable. Almost every aspect of the UI, functionality, and native shell hooking can be configured to your liking.

⚙️ The EliteSettings Control Panel Applet (CPL)

The primary way to configure Elite-TaskBar is through the EliteSettings.cpl applet. If installed correctly (placed in System32), it can be launched directly from the native Windows Control Panel, or by double-clicking the Elite-TaskBar tray icon.

Core Configuration Tabs

  • Taskbar Settings: Configure taskbar positioning, Aero Glass opacity, auto-hide, and whether to "Show Seconds" on the system clock.
  • Desktop: Toggle the custom Progman desktop replacement window, configure the SysListView32 desktop grid, and setup custom GDI+ wallpapers.
    • Note: The wallpaper renderer uses smart bitmap caching in memory to ensure maximum performance when the window repaints.
  • Start Menu: Configure the Open-Shell fallback integration, allowing the classic start menu to invoke natively instead of the modern UWP menu.
  • Themes & Appearance: Utilize the custom icon theme importer. Here you can swap out standard UI images (toolbar buttons, menubar icons) with custom .ico or .png files. You can also specify the path to your native theme directory for automatic detection and previewing.

🧠 Registry Backend

Under the hood, all settings are serialized and saved natively into the Windows Registry.

The primary configuration path is: HKCU\Software\EliteSoftware\Win32Explorer\Advanced

If you are writing scripts or deploying Elite-TaskBar across multiple machines, you can directly modify these DWORD and String values to manipulate the taskbar without opening the UI.

💾 Portable Mirror Mode

If you prefer not to rely strictly on the HKCU registry, you can enable Portable Mirror mode from within the Settings applet. When enabled, this mode will:

  1. Save all configurations to a portable XML file in the application directory.
  2. Simultaneously mirror the registry writes to HKLM (All Users) instead of HKCU, enforcing the settings system-wide.

Clone this wiki locally