Every reboot or wake places a Touch Keyboard toolbar icon on the Windows 8 taskbar. You can turn it off, but it always reappears. You can stop it or disable it in Local Services, but this only inactivates the keyboard - it doesn't stop the icon from loading. I have now turned it off about 500 times and am getting seriously fed up with it. Does anyone know how to kill it permanently? If not I guess I will have to wait for Windows 8.1, and hope that MS is smart enough to realise what a waste of space this for 99% of notebook users, who would IMO never need or want to use a touch keyboard.

There are a few registry entries that refer to it, but I am uncertain what the effect of deleting them would be.  It may be possible to uninstall the touch pad which is reported to kill the touch keyboard, but this is an unsatisfactory solution. Deleting one or more registry entries might kill it, but none appears to be an on/off switch, more is the pity.  HELP please!

This was posted earlier on MS Answers, with no useful response.

I'm having the same issue and it's extremely annoying. I'd love to find an answer as well.

Hi.

Refer to here.

You have to stop and disable this windows services:

• Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service
• Touch screen keyboard and handwriting panel (alternative name)

If it is VMWare virtual machine, you also have to:

• Open up the Virtual Machine .vmx file into notepad.

Find the line:

touchscreen.vusb.present = "TRUE"

and change it to read:

touchscreen.vusb.present = "FALSE"

• Save the .vmx file. Restart the Virtual Machine.

Hope that helps!