SysTray Icons of some programs don't re-appear after Explorer restart

UsernameIssues · 16 Mar 2012

ajfudge said:

........why the system tray icons of some programs do not re-appear after restarting Windows Explorer....

Probably because that is the way that the programs with the missing icons were written... they create the icon once and then never do it again.

ajfudge said:

........Is this normal?.......

Windows sends out a message that explorer is starting (or in this case, restarting), some programs simply do not "listen" for that message. So for those deaf programs, it is normal for the icons not to show up again until you either:
kill and restart the program that has the missing icon
or reboot the computer.

However, there are programs that do "listen" to that particular operating system message and sometimes their icon will reappear after explorer crashes/restarts and sometimes their icons will not reappear??? I can only guess that this is a timing issue - too many apps setting up icons right after a restart of explorer.

quickdraw2011 · 17 Mar 2012

I'm currently not on my Windows 7 computer. Try this.
Right-click the taskbar. Right-click properties. Remove the tick from where it says, Hide inactive icons. Click apply. Or leave the tick in the box to hide inactive icons and instead click on Custom. Select the program you want in the list.(If it's there) To the right, you will see a drop down arrow. Click that, then from the drop down box choose always show.

ajfudge · 17 Mar 2012

@UsernameIssues,
Thanks for that info. I thought that it could be the program's fault and your answer satisfies confirms it. As for the other programs sitting in my system tray, their icons are consistently present. Just bummed out that there's no other way around this.

quickdraw2011 · 17 Mar 2012

Microsoft excerpt:
The system tray (in short: systray, nowadays also called taskbar notification area) is the icon strip normally located near the right end of the task bar, next to the clock.
Some Windows 7 installations show a peculiar defect in that some systray icons disappear or, rather, do not appear, when the system is booted and the user logs on. The problem is even more prevalent on systems with autologon. The most frequently affected icons seem to be the speaker icon (sound volume) and the power/energy icon.

UsernameIssues · 17 Mar 2012

It is sad that the OP has explorer.exe crashing from time to time :-(

A script that watches for explorer to crash might help the OP. In the video below, MagicDisc restarts faster than Task Manager updates... so I added the Process ID column so that you can see the old and new instance running.

The script "4TrayIcons.exe" uses very little RAM and CPU... but note that there was only 256MB assigned to the W7 32bit VM running that script in the video. Notice the differences in the RAM used by several things when 1.5GB was assigned:

SysTray Icons of some programs don't re-appear after Explorer restart-1.5gb.jpg

You can add as many programs as you wish to this one script and it should restart them all. Let me know if you see a flaw in the method/code. I have not been trained for this kind of stuff.

Code:

;AutoIt Version: 3.3.8.1
#NoTrayIcon

While 1 ;loops forever waiting for explorer to crash

    Do ;waits for desktop to disappear
        Sleep(1000)
    Until Not WinExists("Program Manager")

    ;restarts explorer/desktop for you
    Run(@WindowsDir & "\explorer.exe", @WindowsDir)

    ;waits for the desktop to appear
    WinWait("Program Manager", "", 5)

    ;give the desktop time to create the notification area
    Sleep(3000)

    ;;;;first program to close and restart
    ;usually closes on first try, unless the system is busy
    For $i = 1 To 100 ;try 100 times to close the program
        ProcessClose("MagicDisc.exe")
        Sleep(100)
        If Not ProcessExists("MagicDisc.exe") Then ExitLoop
    Next
    Run("C:\Program Files\MagicDisc\MagicDisc.exe")

    ;;;;second program to close and restart
    ;usually closes on first try, unless the system is busy
    For $i = 1 To 100 ;try 100 times to close the program
        ProcessClose("replace-this-name.exe")
        Sleep(100)
        If Not ProcessExists("replace-this-name.exe") Then ExitLoop
    Next
    Run("C:\Program Files\MagicDisc\replace-this-name.exe")

    ;;;;;you can copy/paste/change more code below here for more programs to close & restart


WEnd

You can download AutoIt3 from here. Once installed, try the steps shown in the video below to copy/paste/save/compile the code above.

AutoIt uses UPX to compress the compiled code. That might set off your antivirus tool (more about that here). If it does, delete the compiled file and put the text file in the Startup folder instead. Or you can visit the AutoIt forums to learn how to turn off the UPX compression.

Here is a VirusTotal scan of the compiled code. Only Jiangmin did not like the UPX. Without UPX compression, VirusTotal showed two AV tools that did not like the compiled code. And finally, as a pure text file - no AV tools flagged the code.

But the OP really should find the reason for explorer crashing...

Hope this helps.