Ryan333: In general: a simple right-click on the taskbar should show options for disabling many of the Microsoft widgets like Cortana, Search, News, etc. And if something isn't directly listed there, there's a pretty good chance you can disable it by selecting Taskbar Settings > Select Which Icons Appear on the Taskbar (that should include 99% of third-party taskbar widgets as well).
I would also add, you can remove a lot of this bloatware in settings, add remove programs, add remove windows features. Or, my preference use geekuninstaller, it has a tab to remove the annoying things like IE and Edge which come back over and over (now with a new entry for update 1 for software I didn’t want in the first place!).
What we need is a Win10 base, which has only bits actually needed to work rather than all the crap they add on.