Clear Unread SMS/MMS Icon on Palm Treo Pro

Every now and then on my Treo Pro, the unread SMS notification icon gets “stuck” on the default time screen that shows when the backlight turns off or when the power button is hit. My Today screen will show “No unread messages” but I will still see the icon which should let me know there are unread texts. There is a simple registry fix I used to clear this. If you don’t have a registry editor on your phone, PHM Registry Editor is a good one.

If you are sure you really have zero unread messages, go to the following registry locations:

HKEY_Current_User\System\State\Messages\MMS\Unread
HKEY_Current_User\System\State\Messages\sms\Unread

In each location, there will be a key titled “Count.” Change these values to zero. In my case, the key for MMS was set to 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal, or, -1 in two’s compliment), which clearly is an erroneous value. Once I changed this number back to zero, the unread notification icon disappeared!