Ah, I thought you were referring to the tutorial on the first page here instead.
The reset notification area icons .bat from the tutorial below may work without restarting, but not always. I just opted to have it restart to fully work.
Notification Area Icons - Reset
One way that often works to force settings save without killing Explorer or rebooting is to log off. Of course once you log off there's no convenient way to log in under script or batch control. But I guess it could be presented as an option to the user. Like "log off instead of reboot? (you may have to log back in manually)"
or some such.
What is it with this OS that so many little mods/fixes require a restart? Unlike a normal brat that learns with a stern reprimand, this OS seems to behave like the proverbial stubborn red-headed stepchild that requires a firm slap up the side of his head.
(1.) It'd be great if Windows at least had an option to show icons and notifications by default, rather than hiding them by default. Average non-technical users are more likely not to know how to show hidden system-tray icons—so wouldn't it be a better idea to show them by default, until the user hides them? Otherwise, most users never see them until their apps need their attention. It's tedious having to manually change this setting for every app we install that uses the system tray. I'm not sure what Microsoft was thinking on that one. Windows 8 also has a habit of "forgetting" some of these settings, and I find myself having to re-set some of them every week or so.
(2.) Guys, you should learn the difference between its and it's. It's—with an apostrophe—means "it is". If you don't mean "it is", use its. Otherwise, when you say something like this:
> To Hide a System Icon and it's Notifications
...you're actually saying:
> To Hide a System Icon and it is Notifications
...which doesn't make much sense.
The problem of this notification/icon reset on re-boot has been reported by at least two other people in this thread and has now also affected me for the last four or five starts. I usually leave the computer running for days and only turn it off if I won't use it for a longer time or windows update is asking for it. Have outlook and live mail icons enabled to show which disappear and are replaced by network and volume. This is annoying and seems to creep up occasionally. As there is a registry approach explained I wonder if it should be possible to export the registry and then just have the key run in autoexec to fix the notifications/icons. This may be a work around, but a real solution would be much better to prevent this from happening in the first place.
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