System Tray - Missing Icons

Windows XP Home with all latest patches.

After booting up to the desktop most of the icons are not visable in the system tray.
The Task Manager shows that the Processes have started and they all work.

The problem is that I can only acess two of the "missing" programs by right-clicking their icon from the System Tray. As they are not in the tray, I have a BIG problem.

Where possible I have opened the "missing" program's config and re-ticked 'show in system tray'. However, each time I reboot they are missing again.

The problem seems to have started when I began my home network and enabled ICS.

The problem machine is the one that obtains its DNS and I think that as this process takes a few seconds, and the startup stalls a little here, that it may have something to do with my problem.

As this is affecting several programs I am sure that it is not related to the programs themselves.

Shows in Tray:
Norton Antivirus
Zonealarm
Realtek Audio

Does NOT Show in Tray:
InCD
Ram Idle LE
MS Messenger
Logitech Joystick Profiler
MSI Liveupdate

 

Have you tried right clicking the system tray /properties / customize. You can choose what icons you want to see

click on the icon . It will give you the options

Hide when inactive
Always hide
Always show

hope this helps

 

Yip, tried that as well. No luck.

 

Unfortunately this seems to be a common bug in XP, have a look at this guide hopefully one of these will solve your problem
http://www.tech-pro.net/howto_013.html

 

Thanks, I will give it a try.