System Tray Icons Won't Appear Everytime!

Hi All,

I've got problem, granted its only a small one but annoying none the less!

The icons in my system tray (bottom right) sometimes won't appear when I start up Xp, sometimes they all load fine and other times only some of them load. I've to manually start / restart the ones that don't.

The ones that mostly don't start up are monitoring software, for temps and internet activity.

Any advice on how I could make it 100% sure that they'll all turn up every time?

Any help would be great,

72oo

 

^^^^^

Seems this isn't exactly a burning issue with most people!

 

install vista. that will fix it

 

Probably not - my guess is, too many people are dealing with trying to get Vista off after doing an ill-advised install over a perfectly good XP install.

Anyway, if you haven't googled it, you should, you'll find that lots of people have tried to deal with this little problem. This google search brings up plenty of hits. One page with an extensive discussion (but no good explanation - no-one really seems to know why it happens ), is this page.

I've had the problem with my volume icon intermittently disappearing and reappearing on previous installs of XP, and the solution I've found easiest is to go into the registry, to this key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify

and delete the following two values:
PastIconsStream
IconStreams

The system automatically re-creates those values upon reboot, and my experience has been that my volume icon will usually stick around for a while before disappearing again, at which point I just repeat the exercise.

Anyway, hope that helps a bit.

 

In Vista, you can right-click the taskbar > Properties > Notification Area and either uncheck "Hide inactive icons" or click "Customize" to control which icons show up when. I only mention because I'm guessing XP has something similar... but I'm not sure.

Wait a minute... are the programs not running? Or are they running but the icons aren't showing?

 

It's not that the icons are hiding due to inactivity, it's that they aren't appearing at system start. I had that problem with XP for awhile. I have no idea why...and chalked it up to a corrupt XP installation. I do like to tinker with beta and trial-ware, so it's possible I fudged some reg keys. I'm pretty careful, but I just couldn't pin-point the solution. Usually logging out and logging back in would fix it.

 

sys restore it

 

Hey all,

Thanks for the suggestions, I think I'll try the regedit solution. And then the others.

Cheers -


72oo