*Inconsistent* Tray Icon Disappearance

I have a situation where, every time I power up, some of my tray icons are missing (although any associated start-up programs *are* running). But the number that go missing tends to vary at each power-up. I can always get the missing ones to appear just by logging off my account and logging back on, but I shouldn't have to keep doing that.

What makes this situation doubly perplexing is that the pattern is unpredictable. I have 13 icons that are supposed to appear at every power up. (Nine are hidden by design, but varying the hiding options makes no difference whatsoever.) Two of them show up without fail. Five of them show up about 75% of the time (these include the the Windows sound control and battery power icons). Three show up about 40-50% of the time. And the last three almost never show up. Those numbers aren't precise, of course, but give you an idea how erratic the behavior is.

The computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad W530 laptop. This situation has been occurring for almost the whole time I've had the computer (about five months).

Any idea on what might be going on and I can fix it? Thanks.

MilesAhead said:

What does "Nine are hidden by design" mean exactly?

All I meant is that in "Customize" I have "Hide Icons and Notifications" selected for nine of the thirteen icons. I have experimented with setting all of them to "Show Icon and Notifications" but I still get exactly the same type of inconsistent icon appearance/non-appearance pattern I described. I.e., it makes no difference whether any given icon is set to show up in the main tray or in the "hidden icons" pop-up area

maxie said:

Hi there ...

Notification Area Icons - Reset

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately that didn't work. It did some "cleanup," and moved some hidden icons to the tray and vice versa, but the original problem I described remains.

Any more suggestions?

Even if no one has a solution (and based on what I've gathered from Googling I doubt anyone does...) does anyone understand *why* logging out and logging back in causes all the missing notification area icons to reappear? Indeed, the icons that are most often absent tend to show up the *fastest* when I log off / log on, which is counter-intuitive.

MilesAhead said:

This may be worth a shot:
How to Clean the Notification Area Icon Cache in Windows 7 & Windows 8

Well, without going into all the detail, let's just say that it looked promising at first but I quickly ended up right where I started. But thanks for the suggestion.

maxie said:

Some thing is blocking your Icons to load occasionally .. Read the Link below.. That might give you a clue to what is causing the issue ..


Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup

Last night I was trying a less-systematic but similar approach, namely experimenting with disabling some start-up programs/utilities, and changing some automatic-start services to "automatic (delayed)." The services-delay trials didn't help my issue, but I *was* making some progress after disabling some start-up exes. In general the more I disabled, the fewer tray icons that would fail to appear upon reboot...though exactly *which ones* would be "back" seemed to vary upon each reboot.

So later I'll try the more systematic approach you linked to. In the meantime, I'm doing this: Of the items that fall in the "icon often or usually fails to show" category, there are only two that I use much. For one of them, a keyboard hotkey instantly gets the icon to appear. And for the other one I have created a simple keyboard shortcut to get it to appear. For the rest that tend to go missing, since I don't use them often I guess it's not a big deal to log off/on to get them to appear when needed.