Realtek HD Audio Manager not closing

Eagle51 said:

Hey ddelo,
I have an HP with Beats Audio Control Panel and it does the same thing. I haven't found a fix for this, as it's the way they wrote the program (i.e. the - minimizes to taskbar and x closes to systray instead of actually closing the program). The only work around I've found is to stop it from running at startup ... In Task Manager > Startup disable the RealTek HD Audio Manager and in Windows Services set the RealTek Audio Service startup to Manual.

Note:
1. I admit it's not really much of work around, but since I don't use the thing it works for me.
2. You can still start it from control panel, but you still have to kill using task manager.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have done, more or less, something similar:
1. Using autoruns, I disabled it from startup and
2. When opening it (which is not that often), I created a shortcut with a command to kill the task.

Kbird said:

I know it's not a real Service as in the Sense of Windows ( why I used "quotes" ) but don't you lose the EQ/DTS/Dolby/Beats etc stuff if it is not running? perhaps you use another EQ instead ? I do on this machine , Equalizer-APO with the PEACE GUI , but having the RT manager in the hidden Icons doesn't both me.

I can see how if the EQ effects and Port Sensing are lost if turning it off does happen, that HP etc wouldn't want that too happen as there would be too many TS Calls with non-savvy Users wondering why the Audio didn't work properly.

If it's not running I don't lose anything (EQ, DTS etc). And exactly as you said, having it hidden does not bother me at all. The only problem with that, is that since I don't need it and it does not degrade anything, why having it open (and hidden) to consume resources? After all it should be up to the user to enable or disable its system tray existence, like msi, GIGABYTE and ASUS do.
As it is a configuration app, I used once to setup my listening preferences and since then, once in a while if I want to change something.

Nope. Just for EQ and Audio Enhancements.
Once you set them up...you're done. Switching is taken care by Windows.