Wednesday, March 23, 2011

SOLUTION: Systray \ System Tray icons missing on taskbar in Windows XP?

Have you ever found that one of your system tray icons is missing when you boot up Windows XP?

The system tray (in short systray, also called taskbar notification area) is the icon strip located to the far right end of the task bar, next to the clock. Some Windows XP installations have a defect, in that some systray icons disappear or, rather, do not appear, when the system is booted when a user logs on. The problem is even more common on systems with autologon. The most frequently affected icons seem to be the speaker icon (sound volume) and the power / energy icon if on a laptop (notepad).

I had my sound icon missing for a while on my desktop but recently I found a very easy way to correct the problem. Very annoying as when ever I wanted to increase or decrease the volume I would have to go into Control Panel; Sounds and Audio Devices.

To fix this, simply download and run (on the affected computer) the installer below (after unzipping it using 7zip or what ever you use to unzip zip files):

http://nars.aloj.net/download/shell32patch.zip

2 comments:

  1. Well. I would just go to program files and click on any said devious program. Click settings and add to or remove from system tray. No need at all for any extra overload on a PC.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Les, the small program corrects a issue in the shell32. It adds no extra load on the PC; simply corrects an error in the original code. Pete :)

    ReplyDelete

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