DescentBB

sometimes when i restart/boot my machine, all of the program icons will not load.... sometimes they will. is there a known issue with XP SP2? no i do not have \"Auto Hide\" enabled.


PS: Like right now, im supposed to have 9 icons in my tray, but i only have 5, but all the associated programs are listed in the task manager.

did you try clicking this?

If you don't have that << thing, I had a similar issue before after installing some application. Google \"missing task tray icons\" or something and you will find the solution.

AlphaDoG wrote:did you try clicking this?

AceCombat wrote: no i do not have "Auto Hide" enabled.

you must have skipped the part when i said i do NOT have auto hide enabled. those << only appear when AutoHide is turned on

AceCombat wrote:

AlphaDoG wrote:did you try clicking this?

AceCombat wrote: no i do not have "Auto Hide" enabled.

you must have skipped the part when i said i do NOT have auto hide enabled. those << only appear when AutoHide is turned on

Doh!

I've seen that problem on my XP Pro x64 (SP2) machine at work. It seems to happen when a process crashes (like an app I'm working on), and the system tray icons just don't get refreshed correctly. XP must refresh them periodically, though... becuase if that happens, usually they're back after an hour or two.

mine just dont load at all, its not a crashing program issue... but the process/program associated with the icon is in the task manager...

i know its not a crashing program issue because sometimes they will load on startup, sometimes they wont. but for some of the programs i can load the program and the icon appears.


ohwell, i know whats running at all times anyways, thanx for the help

If explorer.exe crashes and auto-reloads it can sometimes cause the tray icons to disappear.

JMEaT wrote:If explorer.exe crashes and auto-reloads it can sometimes cause the tray icons to disappear.

I would go so far to say that for many of the icons that should be in the tray, the explorer.exe reloading (due to error or crash, whatever) will result in icons from certain programs not showing in the tray.

Since AceCombat says this is happening sometimes when he restarts or starts up ... an error is occurring during the startup of his system.

I'd suggest he study out what items are starting up when his system loads and remove anything he doesn't need (or doesn't want)... while being careful not to disable or 'break' important programs. That way he can attempt to eliminate whatever it is that is precipitating the problem.

He might also want to look in the computer's System event log and Application event log to see if any errors are being logged at startup.

TechPro wrote:

JMEaT wrote:If explorer.exe crashes and auto-reloads it can sometimes cause the tray icons to disappear.

I would go so far to say that for many of the icons that should be in the tray, the explorer.exe reloading (due to error or crash, whatever) will result in icons from certain programs not showing in the tray.

Since AceCombat says this is happening sometimes when he restarts or starts up ... an error is occurring during the startup of his system.

I'd suggest he study out what items are starting up when his system loads and remove anything he doesn't need (or doesn't want)... while being careful not to disable or 'break' important programs. That way he can attempt to eliminate whatever it is that is precipitating the problem.

He might also want to look in the computer's System event log and Application event log to see if any errors are being logged at startup.

I second that motion

Just for a test, lets change a couple things in the windows registry...

Create these keys if they don't already exist:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\Advanced\\SeparateProcess = 1(dword)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\DesktopProcess = 1(dword)

Try it and see if it helps any, doing this will make explorer separate out all its instances so if one crashes (say a folder window) it won't take the taskbar/desktop (and by extension of that: the tray icons either) out with it.

Krom wrote:Just for a test, lets change a couple things in the windows registry...

Create these keys if they don't already exist:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\Advanced\\SeparateProcess = 1(dword)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\DesktopProcess = 1(dword)

Try it and see if it helps any, doing this will make explorer separate out all its instances so if one crashes (say a folder window) it won't take the taskbar/desktop (and by extension of that: the tray icons either) out with it.

Any downsides to doing that, that you know of?

Not really, separating the processes will use a bit more memory than keeping it as a single threaded process, but hardly enough to make a difference. And I'd say it has no impact on performance either way. I use it because explorer used to crash when you had a corrupt, incomplete or a large amount of avi files in a folder because of explorer reading meta data out of them with bad codecs. It got annoying when it bombed all the tray icons too so I forced the processes apart and eventually disabled explorer from reading meta data out of video files entirely. Even without the avi files it is still handy once in a while when some explorer thread gets stuck in an infinite loop reading thumbnails or something stupid like that.

well i know for a fact that Explorer is not crashing, this is occuring from a fresh boot.... not a recovery.


but ill search for those and plug em in


okay, i had the first one but it was set to 0 and i changed it to 1. checking for the other.....dont have the other one at all....... created the second one.... rebooting....... 3 reboots and still not loading all the icons properly, i noticed how XP would take a breif moment between loading each icon(the ones that did load) but other than that, they are all still not loading

Then that means explorer is most likely not invisibly crashing while everything is still loading, the problem must be somewhere else.

any ideas? im about to just forget it

What does the Event log show??

Those TSR/resident Crapplettes are loaded differently in your system tray

The ones you are still seeing are usally System craplettes and the ones you are not...User craplettes ... I think you can figure the rest out on your own!

one has failed leaving the rest blank

BTW you shouldn't have all that crap in the system tray at startup ANYWAYS!