NukeSilo.com

Most people are accustomed to having a clock in the notification area (also known as the system tray) on their windows desktop. In the Microsoft Terminal Services world that isn’t the default behavior. The clock is hidden by default for remote sessions to save network traffic caused by screen refreshes occuring at minute intervals. The problem I’ve found is that when users are used to having something as simple as a clock in their notification area, they aren’t very understanding when it is no longer there.

In order to get the clock to appear we’ll have to check a few settings. Firstly, we need to check the group policy settings. Disable the following if enabled.

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar > Remove Clock from the system notification area

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar > Hide the notification area

Now the above settings doesn’t force the clock to appear. Users will need to enable it in the Taskbar properties, which in most cases will be restricted. The easiest way to force the clock to appear is to make a simple registry edit.

Start regedit and locate:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerStuckRects2

Open “Settings” and if should look similar to this:

"Settings"=hex:28 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff 02 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 6b 00 ....

The ninth pair of hexadecimal values are what we need to edit. Before we can edit that hex value we need to know what we will change it to. There are four properties that can be combined in this setting.

 0x01 = Auto hide
0x02 = Always on top
0x04 = Show small icons in the Start menu
0x08 = Hide Clock

Combine the desired properties into one byte.

Always on top (0x02) + Show clock (0x00) = 0x02
Always on top (0x02) + Hide clock (0x08) = 0x0a

The right hand nibble (four bits) of the 02 contains two other Taskbar and Start menu properties as shown below:

0 0 1 0
| | | |
| | | +----- Auto hide (0 = disable, 1 = enable)
| | +------- Always on top (0 = disable, 1 = enable)
| +--------- Unknown
+----------- Show clock (0 = enable, 1 = disable)

After making the change you will need to restart or logoff. This registry key can be exported as a .reg file and set to run as a login script if you want it to apply to multiple users.

Share This