Windows 7 taskbar icon duplicated

I have Heidi pinned to my windows taskbar and when I open the program another Heidi icon appears there and in effect I have two icons: one is the pinned one and the other is the highlighted icon of the running program. This is non standard behaviour in windows - normally when I open a program using the taskbar icon it is not duplicated but simply highlighted as active. Having two Heidi icons is a bit confusing and wastes space.

I noticed this began happening a few months ago - before then this worked properly without duplicate icons. Then something happened (a change in Heidi) and I'm always seeing the problem of duplicate icons.

Is there a chance of bringing back the standard behaviour of the taskbar icon?

I think this is due to the recently implemented JumpList feature . I had to register a unique AppId with a Windows API call, so Windows knows where to store the JumpList when HeidiSQL is not running. Now, along with the new 64 bit builds, I had to modifiy this AppId with a trailing "[32 or 64]bit". And I saw once the same thing you're reporting here. But I pinned it once again, removed the old icon, and everything was nice since then.

So, please try the same - delete the old icon and pin the new one again.

Deleting the icon and pinning the new one didn't help. I even uninstalled Heidi and reinstalled with the latest build installer, pinned the icon again and same problem.

Moreover, I think the Jump List feature does not work for me as intended. When Heidi is not running the Jump List only shows two items: "HeidiSQL" and "Unpin this program from taskbar". Only when I start Heidi and the new icon appears I get the Jump List with recent connections - but only on the new active icon. The pinned icon still shows only the two items.

If this works for you then maybe there is some junk on my computer from previous installations? Cleaning some registry settings would help?

Yes, I guess so. Only I'm not sure where Windows stores these jumplist items. ApplicationId is either "HeidiSQL32" or "HeidiSQL64", depending on your Windows.

Still no luck. I uninstalled Heidi, searched for all registry items containing "Heidi" and removed them including the server list as well. I didn't find anything called "HeidiSQL32" or "HeidiSQL64", there was a folder "HeidiSQL". After installing Heidi again the problem with the taskbar remains.

It looks like this problem is unrelated to my system. I started a virtual machine with a clean windows 8 system and installed Heidi there. The same problem with duplicate taskbar icons occurs.

So, as that doesn't happen on my Win7 (neither 32 bit nor 64), it could be a Windows 8 related issue. Will check with a colleage tomorrow who has Win8 installed, whether he is able to reproduce that issue.

No, it's not Windows 8 related (I think). Normally, I use Win7 Home Premium 32-bit and now I have tested it in Win8 32-bit Enterprise (this is the VM provided by MS for testing IE 10). To make it more complete I also installed Heidi in a VM with Win7 32-bit. The problem appears everywhere.

I managed to find out why there is a discrepancy between your and my experience. It turns out that in order for the taskbar icon to work properly (without being duplicated) is to pin it using the icon of the running Heidi instance. So when the icon is unpinned I have to run Heidi then pin it to the taskbar by right clicking the active icon on the taskbar.

What doesn't work properly is pinning the icon from another Heidi icon which is on the desktop or somewhere in the start menu - and this is what I did. I never thought that this could matter so I didn't even try other ways.

So this is only half-broken. I don't know how important it would be to fix it - I'm fine with how it works now but the worst thing about it is that an average user might be unaware of it - so at least for this reason I think it would be worthwhile to do something about it.

If I knew what to do I would gladly to it. I'm stuck here.

It has something to do with the .lnk file shortcut being slightly different. The 'good' .lnk shortcut that gets created in the system roaming taskbar folder has a few more bytes than the standard shortcut that gets created straight from heidisql.exe (and gets installed on the desktop by the installer). However, I can't see any differences in the properties dialogue so there must be some other properties that relate to the jump list.

So when I copy the good shortcut to the desktop I have both the good and bad shortcuts side by side and I can use the good desktop shortcut to create the good taskbar icon that doesn't get duplicated.

I think this comes down to some properties of heidisql.exe file - those properties are inherited by the shortcuts and that's why Pin To Taskbar creates a taskbar icon with wrong properties. Pin To Taskbar directly on the .exe also creates a bad icon.

Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this so I can't help you here. I'm just thinking aloud...