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Occasionally you may want to clear out the list of tasks from the ‘Recent Tasks’ section of your vSphere Client. The tasks listed will disappear after a period of time but sometimes you may want to remove them then and there, for example: if wanting to take a nice clean screen grab of the VMware vSphere Client interface for a guide or document you may be working on.
The easiest way to do this is to simply exit out of the vSphere Client and then re-open it again. What could be simpler? 
Update: A few people have been asking why bother posting something so fundamental. The reason is that someone asked me a while ago how to clear the ‘Recent Tasks’ and also in my travels on the VMware Forum over the weekend I noticed a couple of forum posts asking the same thing. What is easy and obvious for one person isn’t always the same for someone starting out. 
Timeout is 10 mins iirc
Thanks Greg.
10 mins sounds about right.. It’s one of those stats that doesn’t see to be documented in too many places.
Cheers,
Simon
Or if you don’t want tasks shown on screenshots, simply close that part of the window by clicking on the Tasks button in the bottom left corner 🙂
Good tip. Thanks. 🙂
I also noticed only recently that the tasks pane can be resized.
The place where it is documented is in the vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices whitepaper.
I wrote something on the task and events a while back.
http://blog.krystaltek.com/2010/10/vcenter-task-lifetime-and-timeout.html
Doesnt work for VC 5.0. I reponned VC client, but completed tasks are still there..
Wow… quitting an application and returning into it is the solution??? it would have been simpler to include a right-click function to do it without quitting the app!?