How To: Remove a pinned Diablo III taskbar icon (without uninstalling)

I’m not sure WHY this is the case, but the Diablo III icons that Blizzard installs by default, to desktop and start menu, are really weird in Windows 7.

If you use one of them to “pin to taskbar” like you would (nearly) any other application, you can’t right-click on them, for example to remove them (they also don’t have ANY jump list).  But you can move it around the taskbar.  It won’t even show up in the AppData folder C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar with all the others which is even weirder.

The solution is: let Windows do the work for you.

  1. Find the original shortcut you pinned to the taskbar.  (Skip to 3 if you already deleted it, like with the desktop icon.)
  2. Send it to the recycle bin.
  3. Click on the taskbar icon.  Prompt will pop up asking if you want to delete the shortcut.  Do so.
  4. Restore the original shortcut back to wherever it was if you want.

Okay, so now that the crazy witchcraft shortcut is gone, you can make a new one.  Head over to your D3 install directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Diablo III), right-click on the Diablo III Launcher, create a shortcut, and then drag that shortcut to the taskbar.  You can delete the one in the install directory if you like.

Now you have a perfectly normal taskbar icon that launches the D3 launcher.  Yay.

Hat Tip: for the back-half of the solution.

8 thoughts on “How To: Remove a pinned Diablo III taskbar icon (without uninstalling)

  1. Thanks!!! Its so strange… but thanks for the tip, works great on Windows 7 Pro 64′

  2. The icon is definitely broken, but there’s an easier way to remove it, if you’ve still got the game installed: shift right-click on it, and you’ll get the context menu that a normal right-click should provide, allowing you to unpin it.

  3. Yeah, Shift Right-Click is the way to go if it works. Sometimes though, like with the latest WoW patch, it’ll break the icon and trying to delete it from context will throw up “Can’t find item”.

  4. I was just having the same issue and your post came up in google.
    While following your steps, I couldn’t remember where I installed Diablo III, so I went to the start menu, went to the Diablo 3 folder, and right clicked the Shortcut there, (so I could go to properties and get the path) and I noticed it said Unpin task. That also seemed to work =)

  5. Thanks I used this to remove my World of Warcraft icon that was doing the same thing.