How to fix system tray icons missing in vista and xp

Trouble:

Many a times when the windows boot, the tray icons like volume control icon, network status icon, safely remove hardware icon etc. which should be visible in the tray are not visible properly.

In such a case, many a times you will find volume control missing, or you will find Safely remove hardware icon missing, or any other useful tray icon which you frequently use.

Why are tray icons not loaded properly?

At the time when windows is booting, there are many processes which are simultaneously being launched. All these are running in parallel waiting for the CPU turn. Some times when the CPU is busy with some processes, windows misses to properly load the icons.

Lets see how to fix this issue.

Fix:

The fix is simple, whenever you find that the tray icons are not properly loaded, you can restart explorer task. This will freshly build all the tray, task-bar and desktop icons.

To restart the windows explorer, we have made a small windows-batch file which you can download from here.

Just download and save this file on your computer. Double-click on this file and it will re-start the windows explorer for you. After this, all the tray icons will be loaded properly.

For those who like to do it manually, open the command prompt and type the following two commands one by one:

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

explorer.exe

We hope you find this handy and useful.

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