She clicked "Uninstall Program" from the now-clean Start menu. It opened instantly.

That night, Mara didn't go home. She stayed, hunting through every process that didn't need to be seen. The Windows 10 notification area—always threatening to show "Show hidden icons" like a junk drawer apology—was now pristine. Even Cortana's search box, which she'd never once used, disappeared with a single checkbox.

Within ninety seconds, Mara had nuked forty-three visual parasites from her Windows 10 shell. The system tray shrank from a bloated parade of icons to a dignified row of six. Her desktop showed only "This PC," "Recycle Bin," and the ticket queue.

Then she remembered the USB stick. The one her grizzled predecessor, Leo, had left in a drawer labeled "FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY." On it, a single portable executable: hidetoolz.exe . No documentation. No website. Just a tiny, 411KB file with a creation date of 2009.

Six months later, hidetoolz was quietly deployed across all 1,200 company workstations. The average ticket resolution time for "slow PC" dropped by 68%. No one could explain why. The vendor didn't return emails. The executable had no digital signature. But every tech knew: sometimes the best way to fix Windows 10 wasn't to add more software.

She saved the configuration as clean_start.hide . Then she emailed it to Derek with the subject line: "New standard image for all call center PCs. Stop letting Microsoft decorate our screens."

Ticket #404: resolved. Resolution notes: "Used hidetoolz to remove visual clutter. User education recommended. Also: where has this been all my life?"