Windows 10: Disable Desktop Thumbnails in Windows 11 Task View

I'm using Windows 11 and when I open Task View by pressing Win+Tab, there's a desktop management/preview bar at the bottom of the screen showing my desktop thumbnails. I find this feature unnecessary for me and would like to remove or hide it while keeping the Task View functionality itself.Is there a way to disable only the desktop preview section at the bottom of Task View without disabling Task View completely? I've looked through the taskbar settings but haven't found a specific option for this.Any help or guidance would be appreciated, whether through standard settings or registry modif

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Task View hover on Virtual desktops no longer previews the desktop

After recent upgrade, when I hover over the virtual desktop, it no longer shows the desktop preview. Still shows the thumbnail but not the full preview. This was critical to my workflow, how do I re-enable this.

Steps:

Hover over the task view icon on the task bar. Thumbnails show for all the virtual desktops.

Hover over any Virtual desktop thumbnail, the label shows but not the full preview does not.

Expected the full preview of the desktop to show as in previous versions of Windows 11.

 

Task view thumbnails

At least we got a progress after performing a clean boot. Now, since there are instances that the thumbnails are still disappearing, then this may have something to do with the thumbnail cache. So, here's what to do next.

Follow the steps below to recreate the thumbnail cache using Disk Cleanup:

• Open File Explorer.
• Click This PC on the left pane.
• Right-click the C: driver where Windows 10 is installed and select Properties.
• Next, click Disk Cleanup.
• Uncheck all the boxes, then check the Thumbnail box only.
• Click OK, then click Delete Files to confirm and to complete the task.

After that, you should be able to browse files and folders on your computer with thumbnail previews showing up correctly.

Let us know if this goes well for you.

 

PDF thumbnail view

Setting Adobe Viewer as the default viewer for PDFs fixes this issue. OTOH, if you want to retain Edge as the default PDF viewer, you need to use Adobe's thumbnail module. Run the registry fix pdf_thumbnail_adobe.reg in this article. That should do the trick.

Once done, do the following if required.

• Log off and log back into your account, or restart the Explorer shell via Task Manager.
  
• Clear the thumbnail cache using Disk Cleanup.