Windows 7: Windows Update icon no longer in system tray

Yesterday I installed about 18 updates. Also hid a few. Now the Windows Update icon is not appearing in my system tray even though there are still updates to install (and my MSE definitions updates definitely are new today).

Nothing changed on my system. I even unhid the updates I hid but still no notification. It tells me it checked at 1:37 pm today so it is checking/working but the darn icon is not showing. If I change the icon behavior and then put it back to "show icon and notifications" it says "This notification icon is currently not active, it will be shown the next time it is active". The icon was always there. Now it is not. I have to manually open windows update rather than clicking on the icon. Any ideas?

I had to being this thread back to life.

I noticed that I too have started to have this problem, BUT it is on my old Win XP Sp3 OS!!!

I always for ages had selected let windows download updates but let me choose when to install them. This would cause the WU yellow shield to pop up in the tray letting me know there were updates available and I could click on the balloon to select them.

This past week with latest updates the yellow icon showed up when the latest updates were downloading but after it was finished that task the icon disappeared!

Well actually I noticed that it will flash in the tray for about a couple of second and then disappear again. If I try and click on it nothing happens and it goes away.

Something interesting when I looked in the customization for the tray icons I see my yellow icon listed as "past items" for downloading updates AND also Windows Security Alerts, AND as WIndows Task Manager.

I wonder what is going on here. I have to assume it is something to do with WU, but I have to say that if I go to Microsoft Updates the latest updates are there and available for installation as well. So they WERE downloaded into the system. Just the option of selecting them via automatic updates is gone .

>>>"This notification icon is currently not active, it will be shown the next time it is active".

That applies to my computer too. But I always set it to show only when there is notification. So, I couldn't tell if I could set it to show both icon and notification.

That said, a work-around ....
Create a Windows Update shortcut on desktop.

Start > search box, type windows update > right click at Windows Update at top left > Send To > Desktop (create shortcut)