Turn Off App Switcher & Charms Bar Hot Corners In Windows 8

Hot Corners is one of the major new features in Windows 8. They are basically the four corners of the screen that bring App Switcher, Charms Bar and Start Tile into focus when you move the mouse pointer over their pertaining areas. App Switcher appears when you move the cursor to the top-left; likewise Charms Bar resides on the right edge and appears when the pointer touches the top or bottom-right corners. However, both the top-left and right corners can be quite distracting and annoying under certain circumstances. We have covered a few tools to disable these corners, but if you’re looking for a way to prevent the Charms bar and Switcher from appearing via hot corners without entirely disabling them with a tool, a simple registry hack can do this job...

The screenshot below demonstrates how the Switcher corner blots out Firefox’s orange button and prevents you from accessing any settings if you hover your pointer too close to the corner. Since App Switcher can be accessed from the bottom-left corner as well, this registry hack can remove this hassle by disabling the top-left corner only.

First, you need to open the Registry Editor. To do this, open Start Screen, type ‘regedit’ and press enter. Once Registry Editor is open, navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell

Right-click ImmersiveShell and select ‘New’ followed by clicking ‘Key’ from the context menu.

After creating the key, name it ‘EdgeUI’ (without the quotes) and press enter. Next, you need to create a new DWORD value within the EdgeUI key. Right-click the said key and then click New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the newly created value ‘DisableTLcorner’ (again, without the quotes).

Follow the aforementioned steps again to create another DWORD value, this time renaming it as ‘DisableCharmsHint’ (without the quotes).

Double click the DisableTLcorner value, enter 1 in the Value data field and click OK. This will disable the top-left App Switcher corner, though you may still access it from the bottom-left corner after moving the curser in upper direction from there.

Now, double click DisableCharmsHint and enter 1 in Value data before clicking OK. This will prevent the Charms bar from appearing when the curser touches the top and bottom-right corners. You can still access Charms Bar via moving the curser downwards or upwards from these corners.

After modifying the DWORD values, close the Registry Editor and restart your PC for the changes to take effect. The top-left corner won’t keep you anymore accessing anything now, such as the Firefox button. Likewise, the Charms to the right won’t distract you in tasks like closing a desktop window.