Win XP Home SP2 System Tray

[dmarino]

Since installing SP2, my system tray icons are acting weird. Sometimes they load up as usual, but often many of them are missing. Prior to installing SP2, I had something like a dozen icons in the system tray, and now, since the install of SP2, I have around 4 to 5, and they are sometimes different icons, it is weird. It sucks too, because some of the icons performed functions that I cannot make work unless the icon is there. For example, I used to have an icon entitled "Safely Remove Hardware." I used it when I wanted to remove my wireless PC card without turning off my computer. I tried going to the system tray properties, into the area where you can hide unused system tray icons and no matter what I do there, the icons in the system tray seem to have a mind of their own. Any ideas?

Doug Marino

[Naja]

When I first installed XP SP2 I instantly had problems with various things. I uninstalled SP2 and then reinstalled it several days later and haven't have any problems.

Probably not what Your looking for, but it solved all of my SP2 problems.

HTH

[RJ]

Have you checked that "Hide inactive icons" is turned off in the properties of task bar ?

RJ

[dmarino]

Hide Inactive Icons is NOT checked, that is the weird thing!

Doug

[brodymulry]

Originally Posted by dmarino Since installing SP2, my system tray icons are acting weird. Sometimes they load up as usual, but often many of them are missing. Prior to installing SP2, I had something like a dozen icons in the system tray, and now, since the install of SP2, I have around 4 to 5, and they are sometimes different icons, it is weird. It sucks too, because some of the icons performed functions that I cannot make work unless the icon is there. For example, I used to have an icon entitled "Safely Remove Hardware." I used it when I wanted to remove my wireless PC card without turning off my computer. I tried going to the system tray properties, into the area where you can hide unused system tray icons and no matter what I do there, the icons in the system tray seem to have a mind of their own. Any ideas? Doug Marino

It appears that your Icon Cache is corrupted. If you google for "Icon Cache Clearing" or something like that, you will get instructions on how to clear the Icon Cache. If indeed this does not work, other than saying your OS is buggered if you download Axialis Icon Workshop (30 day trial) there is a option in that to clear/rebuild the Icon Cache for you. Since this does not take 30 days, you can un-install the program when your icons are fixed. If this does not fix the problem, perhaps your OS has turned funky?

[Mesaeus]

Another thing I might add is that when explorer.exe (the desktop) crashes, lots of icons in the system tray will not come back because their associated programs do not redisplay them. It might be that explorer crashed (icons and taskbar will disappear for one or two seconds until a new explorer.exe is started).

[autotran]

For at least the last several months my system tray would show from three to seven icons on start-up. I would always have the same three plus up to four others. It was totally random and nothing I did or tried would make it consistant (I tried all of the above suggestions plus others). The task manager showed at least seven programs active that should have been in the tray. Just recently I removed Norton System Works 2004 and upon boot-up I had eleven icons in the tray! It is now consistant, everytime I boot I have the correct number of tray icons that should be in the tray and I can add or remove them as needed/required. Dave

[autotran]

I started losing the icons again, sometimes showing only six out of twelve. the one that disappeared most often was ePrompter, http://www.eprompter.com/ (It reads all my e-mails automatically), even thou it was loaded and running. I stopped it from starting up and my icon count jumped to eleven and is still loading eleven at every start up. I now start it only when I want to read my e-mails. If this keeps working OK I will reinstall Norton System Works 2004 and see what happens. Dave