Volume control disappears from Taskbar

The volume control, and one or two others, disappears from the Taskbar each time I reboot.

In Taskbar Properties/Customize, there are four Current items, three of which are set to Always show, the other to Hide when inactive. The ones selected to show always appear.

Beneath that list is pne of Past items. Five of those are set to Always show, the remainder to Hide when inactive.

None of those five appear.

If I go to Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices, remove the tick from Place volume icon in the taskbar, click Apply/OK then tick the box again, click Apply, the icon appears immediately.
But it doesn't on reboot.

Why doesn't that icon now appear in the Current list? And why doesn't it reappear on boot?

 

Which version of Windows are you running? I'm running Vista and the attached is all I can come up with.

 

Sorry mdonah, so stupid of me not to have said. I was about to modify the post, or at least make another, when I received notification of your response.

It's XP Pro.

 

I, also, run XP Pro on my computer and again, I can only come up with the attached. How are you able to get individual app icons to show or not show in the System Tray?

 

By right clicking on the Taskbar, which opens up "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties".

Then selecting "Customize", but, as I said, the system doesn't obey.

 

Ah, yes. That's if you've got Hide Inactive icons ticked which I never do because I want to make sure all of my Startup items launch. I've had some issues after Windows updates where upon restarting, one or more of the System Tray icons didn't show and the computer had to be restarted again for everything to show.

The only thing I can suggest is resetting everything to defaults, restarting and then going back through customization. I don't know which programs you're running so, I can't say for sure that one or more are causing the problem.

Here's a pic of my System tray.

 

I just opened up Taskbar and Start Menu Properties again to try different settings, and found that the Volume icon was now in the Current list, albeit as Hide when inactive.

That's been changed to Always show, and I have unselected Hide inactive icons.

Let's see what the system makes of that ..... rolleyes

 

Ah.

That should do it.

 

That's what I thought too ... but it hasn't :mad

Switched the machine on a few minutes ago and it's back to the same exasperating behaviour.

 

Thank you plodr, that's got rid of the older entries.

Let's reboot .....

It's still exhibiting its previous behaviour. Three of the icons which are supposed to be always active are now in the Past items list. again.

 

dmb06851, was wondering if you use Ccleaner? If so, under the "Windows" tab in the "Advanced" section there is an item listed as "Tray Notification Cache" that, when checked, can cause minor annoyances with the system tray icons.

At least it did for me on my XP machine. Some wouldn't stay set to "Always show" and they would be shuffled around to different random positions on each boot/re-boot. Once I unchecked the "Tray Notification Cache" item in Ccleaner, the problem was gone.