System tray icons keeps disappearing 64bit desktop

[JonDelijoe]

Hello, I've run into a strange issue, the system tray icons keep disappearing (volume, wifi, action center). It usually happens after I restart the computer, but not all the time.
I'm running windows 7 home premium 64bit with a nvidia graphics card, and intel i7 3.4ghz; on a desktop computer. I'm also using a custom windows theme, but I've never had issues.

Last actions before issues appeared:
Note: I recently had an issue where explorer kept crashing at startup, I tried to run system restore, but the restore failed and said something about not being able to extract something like system root/[what ever]. Somehow explorer stopped crashing without me doing anything. I'm telling you this just in case it may help you find out what's wrong

Thing's I've tried:
-running the fixit from microsoft
-checking the settings in system tray icons (all are greyed out except clock)
-restarting explorer.exe

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Brink]

Hello Jon,

If everything still works but for the system icons, then you might see if you may be able to enable them using Option Two in the tutorial below.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/19085-system-icons-enable-disable.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[JonDelijoe]

Okay, I tried step two, the network and the volume icon are enabled again, but the action center is still greyed out

 

[Brink]

That's good so far. Are you able to open the Action Center from within the Control Panel (icons view)?

 

[JonDelijoe]

Yes, I'm able to open Action Center from the control panel.

 

[Brink]

Did you restart the computer after merging the .reg files?

I've updated the .reg file in step 1 in OPTION TWO. Please try it again to see if it may help now.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/19085-system-icons-enable-disable.html

 

[JonDelijoe]

Yeah I restarted the computer, I also restarted it after using the updated REG files but it's still disabled


EDIT: Even after restarting the computer, I had to manually restart the explorer process and the network and volume icon appeared, I looked for the action center icon and it was still missing and grayed out.

Then, after few minutes i moused over the tray area and the action center icon appeared out of no where.
Can you explain to me why this happens? I've had this issue before, but never this severe, I've always noticed that Windows has the strangest glitches in the simplest tasks.

Thanks for taking your time to help me

 

[Brink]

Just to be safe do a full scan of your system with MalwareBytes Anti-Malware Free to make sure it's clean.

 

[JonDelijoe]

Okay, I'll scan it over the night and let you know the results, and once again the icons disappeared after restarting the PC...

 

[Brink]

Ok. If your system is found to be clean, then you might consider doing a repair install considering the other issues on top of these.

 

[JonDelijoe]

The scan finished before I fell asleep, and nothing malicious was detected, I dont have a windows disc so I might just do a clean install. I've only had this PC 3 months and I already have to reinstall windows, good thing I copied every installed app I have thanks for your help

Actually before I do that I'm going to try to clean the tray cache with CCleaner
and I just read something that said that this issue is more prevalent with systems that autologon, I don't have a password on my PC, so I assume that would qualify as autologon, even though I didn't enable and specific options it just the default behavior.

and it says something about UPnP

 

[Brink]

If you like you can also reset the notification area to see if it may help.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/13102-notification-area-icons-reset.html

If you wanted to do a repair install instead of a clean install, the repair install tutorial has links for how to download and create a Windows 7 installation DVD/USB to use to do it with. All you will need is your product key number to activate it.

 

[JonDelijoe]

Thanks, I'll give it a try if this doesn't solve the issue. I'll post the result tomorrow if anything changes.

UPDATE: Ok, so, pretty much every failed to fix the issue. I just found that restarting explorer at start up is the only work around. I don't find this too annoying because I tend to restart it anyway because the wifi icon displays the incorrect icon for ethernet cable icon. I have something I downloaded from askvg to restart explorer from the desktop context menu. Thanks Brink for helping me