Disable Windows Defender Security Center Tray Icon

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Disable Windows Defender Security Center Tray Icon

Windows 10 Creators Update version 1703 brought yet another change to Windows 10's UI. There is a new app called Windows Defender Security Center. The application, formerly known as "Windows Defender Dashboard", has been created to help the user control his security and privacy settings in a clear and useful way. Windows Defender Security Center got a tray icon, which is visible out of the box. If you are not happy to see it, here is a way to get rid of it.

You can launch Windows Defender Security Center from the Start menu or with a special shortcut. Alternatively, you can access it using its tray icon. As of this writing, it looks as follows:

There is a helper tool which draws the icon. It is located here:

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"C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MSASCuiL.exe"

This file runs at startup when you sign in to your Windows 10 account and so the icon appears in the tray. To get rid of the icon, you can remove MSASCuiL.exe from startup. This operation has no side effect and will disable the tray icon completely.

To disable Windows Defender Security Center tray icon, do the following.

Open Task Manager.
Switch to the tab named Startup.
Tip: You can open the Startup tab of Task Manager directly in Windows 10 by running the following command:

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taskmgr /0 /startup

Find the line named "Windows Defender notification icon"

Right click it and select "Disable" in the context menu

in the screenshot above, you can see an additional "Command line" column which is not visible by default. To enable it, see the article Get more details about Startup in Windows Task Manager.

Once this is done, you need to sign out from your Windows account and log in back. This will remove the Windows Defender tray icon in Windows 10 Creators Update.