Quote:1) I would like to disable the pop ups from the tray that requests that I remove unused icons from my desktop and any and all other tray pop ups for that matter.
Download
TweakUI (it's a tool directly from Microsoft), install it, start it and go to the "Taskbar and Start Menu"-section. Uncheck the box "Enable balloon tips" and you are free.
The downside is if you want to have that balloon tips in case of being notified of other events (e.g. when you remove an USB-stick or something via the tray icon "remove hardware") you don't get them as well.
Quote:2) I got rid of that stupid dog that would show up when ever I ran "Search" but how can I just run a simple search/find without and the XP crap. I just want to click search/find and type in the file name I'm after.
That can be found in TweakUI, too: section "Explorer", in the list on the right check the boxes in front of "Use Classic Search in Explorer" ad "Use Classic Search in Internet Explorer".
In principle you could go into the registry and change some keys, too, but TweakUI is very powerful and you can't destroy anything, which you can clearly when you mess around in the registry.