Seriously, how to disable taskbar tooltips? This question keeps getting asked by other users, keeps getting closed

A way to "temporarily" disable the tooltip after a hover in the taskbar, is to simply Shift + Right click on any item in the taskbar.  Then when you click away, the tooltip does not continue to show.

Again, this is only temporary, it will prevent the tooltip from being stuck, until it decides to become stuck again.

This frustrated me to no end ever since Windows 7, and I have to re-search the solution every single time to fix it, since I don't use it very often.  Hopefully this can be fixed for good some day.

Update: I have a semi-solution I just stumbled across it seems Greg, it fixes the problem but breaks some other important functionality. I stumbled upon this post: https://superuser.com/questions/1041571/how-do-i-turn-off-taskbar-tooltips-in-a-virtualbox-environment

Option 1 there didn't work for me, but Option 2 of installing the 3rd party 7+ Taskbar Tweaker has an option to do "Nothing" under "Hovering". Now when I mouse over on the taskbar, thank goodness, no tooltips display!

However, there is a big problem. The preview windows when hovering don't display either when this option is enabled. The preview windows are actually a very important feature for me since I can view the state in other programs without needing to go into them directly.

So now I guess the question is, how do we keep this functionality of having the taskbar tooltips disabled, but without breaking the window preview functionality?

The fact a 3rd party app was able to do this makes me believe that it must be possible somehow to disable taskbar tooltips directly via regedit or some Windows 10 API. Setting ShowInfoTooltip in the registry to 0 didn't seem to do the trick for me.

I appreciate your attempt to help Greg but I must say that no, they are not. That is the precise bug I, him, and many other users are trying to report.

The Windows 10 taskbar tooltips are displaying even though the mouse is not hovering over them

You can verify these are indeed the Windows 10 taskbar tooltips. Notice how one of the tooltips says "Steam"? Notice the Steam icon on the Windows 10 taskbar. Notice the same for the "Substance Painter" icon? The tooltip indeed says "Substance Painter", exactly the same as it would if you hovered over it on the Windows 10 taskbar. This is not the program above the taskbar causing these tooltips, even though it looks like it. Rather, this is the Windows 10 taskbar that is showing tooltips even though they're not being hovered over. The program above the Windows 10 taskbar in his example is completely irrelevant. Even if it wasn't there the exact same behaviour of those tooltips would exist, and does exist.

Thanks for your time looking into this Greg, I know a lot of users have been plagued with this issue for years and if you could help, you'd be helping thousands. It seems like a minor thing but it's actually major since a lot of programs that have their own toolbars at the bottom (such as the program in the other users recorded video) have their bottom buttons covered by this tooltip bug, making many programs very difficult to use at times. Paradoxically even Visual Studio itself has important buttons covered by these Taskbar tooltips making development annoying at times.

Here my mouse is nowhere near the Taskbar, it's up in the middle of the screen. "Re hovering" over the Sticky Notes just causes the bug to move to another Taskbar icon tooltip, just like in the other users video. Where my mouse is makes no difference.

Regarding Kapil's solution, as the other user in the other question says, disabling folder tooltips doesn't disable the Taskbar tooltips.

It's interesting to hear it goes back to XP. For whatever it's worth I'd also consider it a solution if you found a way to completely disable all tooltips in Windows 10 including Taskbar tooltips (not just folder tooltips). Being able to disable all tooltips or just taskbar tooltips would be great, either would be fine.

/Rant

I find tooltips to be completely useless and always cover what I'm trying to read. They are an accessibility feature that ironically hinders accessibility for many. The only time I'd use tooltips would be in an IDE which have their own native tooltip windows anyway (and for that matter these tooltip windows native to respective IDEs usually occur below the mouse which makes far more sense, rather than covering what the user is trying to read). It's interesting because I know many users feel the same way as I do, and from what I can gather Microsoft used to provide an option to completely disable tooltips in Winows XP via the registry but for whatever reason hasn't provided this functionality in Windows 10 since release. Unfortunately leaving feedback with Microsoft hasn't resulted in this "feature" being re-added for years now. It's just clumsy UI design when disabling a "feature" is somehow itself considered a "feature". Until now I'm bewildered why this issue is so difficult for Microsoft to fix. I'd be willing to run a donation/charity to give them the money to hire the developers to do so if that's what it took to fix this, as this bug has wasted me a lot in productivity over the years, and I'm sure I could find some other like-minded users willing to chip in to help Microsoft out if it's really that difficult for them to give users the optiondisable tooltips. They can even hide this setting deep in the registry to ensure that most users don't accidentally disable tooltips.

/End Rant

Apologies for this rant, I had to get it off my chest. I hope you may be able to uncover something. And thanks again for your time looking into this.