Technically those red, yellow, and green Security Center “shield” icons that appear on the XP taskbar from time to time are there for a good reason – to keep you informed as to the security status of your firewall, anti-virus program, and automatic updates. However, there may be cases when you don’t want these icons to appear, such as on corporate networks where personal firewall programs are often disabled, or on systems that are updated manually rather than via automatic updates.
If you want to stop Security Center from displaying these status icons on XP’s taskbar, follow these steps:
1. Head to Control Panel and open Security Center.
2. On the left-hand menu, click Change the way Security Center alerts me.
3. In the Alert Settings window, uncheck any of the items for which you don’t want alert messages to appear and click OK.
