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The Budapest Office - Castro Bisztro, Madach ter

The Budapest Office - Castro Bisztro, Madach ter
Ponder, Scribble, Ponder (Photo Erdotahi Aron)

Thursday 1 November 2007

Vista Missing Icons in Systray aka the Notification Area

Ouch...

1st November 2007... no recent updates

Wifi connection disappeared, and for some reason I couldn't re-enable it (the lights are on, but no one's home, i.e. the Rock laptop's indicator lights said the devices were on but Vista wasn't buying it), so reluctantly I rebooted and...

Certain important icons in the Notification Area (the area previously known as the "systray") gone... to whit, battery status and network (and possibly sound volume).

Under Taskbar properties (Notification Area) I eventually find controls to display certain "System Icons" all the time... but apart from the clock they are all disabled (greyed out)... hmmm...

Tried letting Vista "hide" inactive icons to see what it thought was there, and the missing icons aren't in the current or past list... stranger and stranger...

Google... newsgroups... fixes!

a) Log off and back on again - Nope.
b) Regedit and clear the keys "Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify...
"PastIconsStream"" and "IconsStream" - then log off and on again.

No good... but! Aha! The "System Icon" display controls are re-enabled! Click them on and they are all back - battery, network and sound volume!

But for how long?

That's the fun of it, isn't it? Everyone surely needs more such Stuff from Microsoft to keep them occupied. How else would I have wasted the last hour if not for this teeny-weeny little bug...

[Rock Xtreme CTXPro, Dual Core, Vista "Home Premium" (sic)]

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful! Thank you for the fix. For those of you following along, the registry key the author is referring to is in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive in your registry. Also, the second key to delete is actually labeled "IconStreams."

Follow this advice and you will get your icons back (although it wouldn't hurt to create a System Restore first.)

-Jason

Anonymous said...

When you click on the 'Notification Area' of the Taskbar Properties window, there are options for 'system icons'- and one of them is your network. Unselect, and reselect it and your problem is fixed, dude.

The Author said...

Except, dear Anonymous of Jan 28, that as I said those wonderful little tick boxes were greyed out...

Oh, if it had only been that simple...

But Jason was right about the typos... didn't want to correct the blog otherwise his helpful clarification would have looked rather less helpful!

Kenneth said...

I disabled the SSDP and UPnP services and was able to re-enable the missing sound icon in the systray again. Never seen this type of error before. I did have sound and was able to adjust/mute it through my keyboard shortcuts...

Anyways. Have a good one :)

The Author said...

Hmmmm... SSDP and UPnP interacting with the icons? Weird...

I was tempted to ask, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" but I think we would hav been heading a little OT there...

Kenneth said...

Weird solution, I know. But hey, as long as it works I don't complain.

I got it off some tech board, but I no longer remember the URL. THe original poster claimed that the UPnP service and some obscure networking component in the Windows Media Player was the cause for removing and disabling the ability to show the sound icon in the SysTray. And voilà :)

Besides, you don't really need the SSDP or the uPnP service running. I usually have them shut down, but this is a fresh re-install and I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

For those wanting to know. These services used to be a security issue a while back, but MS claimed they plugged it. I'm not all that convinced ;)

Anyways. The frequency is good. As always :)