Disable the AutoCAD InfoCenter

You might want to disable AutoCAD’s InfoCenter with its Help and documentation Search, Communication Center, Autodesk Channels, Balloon Notifications, RSS Feeds and Favorites. One reason is that it can speed up the AutoCAD startup or you just want to hide it. Otherwise it can be quite useful to have there. Here is the solution.

Before

and after

One way is using the CAD Manager Control Utility to control it to some extent or you can use Regedit.exe (or VBScript or a BAT or CMD file) and disable it completely. Just set the LoadCtrls key to 0 in the registry at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R17.2\ACAD-7001:409\Applications\InfoCenterAcConn

(default value for LoadCtrls is 4c as Hexadecimal or 76 as Decimal value in case you want to enable it again)

R17.2\ACAD-7001:409 is for AutoCAD 2009 English version and needs to be changed depending on what AutoCAD product you use. It works with AutoCAD LT as well but then the registry location will start with: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD LT.
For more about the productID and locateID.

Using Visual LISP here is how:

(vl-registry-write (strcat "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\" (vlax-product-key) "\\Applications\\InfoCenterAcConn" ) "LOADCTRLS" 0)

AutoCAD needs to be restarted to see the effect.