Speaker Icon Intermittent on Startup

[Don in San Antonio]

The Speaker Icon does not always register in the tool tray. Each time I
start windows I watch to see whether it will appear. Some times it does
then other times it doesn't.

Details: There are five items in my tool tray: Norton Antivirus,
Webshots, Speaker, Zone Alarm Pro, Network. Norton and Webshots appear
almost immediately and then there's a pause while Norton shows a red
circle with line through it, then a yellow exclamation mark. Finally
the exclamation mark disappears and the next three icons appear. Quite
often the speaker icon is missing. I suspect it's a timing issue, but I
don't know how to fix it. Anyone else had this sort of problem? Is
there a way to fix it? Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[Bob I]

Try killing Webshots

 

[Rock]

The Speaker Icon does not always register in the tool tray. Each time I
start windows I watch to see whether it will appear. Some times it does
then other times it doesn't.

Details: There are five items in my tool tray: Norton Antivirus,
Webshots, Speaker, Zone Alarm Pro, Network. Norton and Webshots appear
almost immediately and then there's a pause while Norton shows a red
circle with line through it, then a yellow exclamation mark. Finally the
exclamation mark disappears and the next three icons appear. Quite often
the speaker icon is missing. I suspect it's a timing issue, but I don't
know how to fix it. Anyone else had this sort of problem? Is there a way
to fix it? Any ideas would be appreciated.

First thing to try is to disable either one or both of these services: SSDP
Discovery Service and the UPnP service. Get to them from Start | Run |
services.msc, click ok.

If that doesn't do it, do some clean boot troubleshooting. If it works from
a clean boot then enable the startup programs one at a time to find the
culprit. After that you can try to figure out what to do about it.

Clean Boot Troubleshooting

How to Troubleshoot By Using the Msconfig Utility in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560

How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=316434

How to perform a clean boot in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310353