Share via

How to get rid of that *@#$@#$ annoying language bar in XP

  • Article

It is a testament to the intransigence of the human spirit that for the last 6 years of my life I have right clicked on that little icon on my taskbar and chosen to remove the "Language Bar" from the taskbar, only to have it pop back up at some later point for some unknown reason. Lather, rinse, repeat this cycle every few days.

Today I finally figured out how to turn off that stupid thing. :-)

In the Regional control panel, on the Languages tab, click Details, then click Language Bar, and turn that sucker off.

Ahhh, sweet relief...

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Dave L - those decisions were made 8+ years ago, the chance of me finding someone involved in it is very minimal at this point. It does seem to have been fixed in vista at least.

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2007
    It's just like the old office search engine. I was always on a mission to search and disable. I've probably turned off the language bar at least 50 times, one for each profile and each machine that I log on to. I certainly hope that the bar is disabled sometime in a future release.

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2007
    FYI -- a quicker way to get there is just to right click on the Language Bar when it pops back up on the taskbar, click on Settings then you can follow your above instructions, and click on Language Bar and disable it. Congratulations on the nigh spiritual experience of first ridding yourself of that accursed bar!

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2007
    KC: I've never understood why the Language Bar business unit received the go-ahead to violate the UI conventions and allow this tool to take up permanent residence on the menu bar.  No other Microsoft software (that readily comes to mind) is allowed this leeway. I would really appreciate it if you can find out from the Language Bar organization how they were allowed to control the user experience in this way.

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2008
    if you want to get rid of the bar for good, I mean you will never be able to reenable it again, then do the following- start-run-type "Regsvr32.exe /u msutb.dll" Do that and its history

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2008
    Great tip!  I thought I was going to have to right click on the task bar every day for the rest of my (PC's) life.