Ok so MS sent me a freebie copy of Windows 7 Ultimate last week and this weekend I decided to upgrade my vista test machine. First thing I notice is this new “homegroup” service they have included and in typical MS form there is no straight forward way to piss it and it’s persistant desktop icon off.

Thankfully they haven’t removed regedit yet so lets look in door number 3….

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFWARE\Microsoft\Wind ows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\

There are a number of Keys here but the one of interest to us today is {B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93}. Export it, and then delete this key. Refresh the desktop (F5) and voila the homegroup icon is gone. This will not effect it’s actual use, so I would take this one step further by opening the homegroup settings and choosing the leave homegroup option.

Lastly go into your services.msc and disable the 2 homegroup services to prevent them running.