I get this occasionally when my explorer crashes, and windows recovers and
reloads it afterwards. The applications you have running will continue,
though you may find that any file system windows will also be closed, but
when the program bar restarts it only contains the main Windows related
icons, like network, sounds, msn etc.
I suspect this is because when the applications start they themselves start
the apps which site in the system tray and do whatever they do. Windows of
course allows this, but doesn't really keep track of which apps are using
the system tray, therefore if it is restarted Windows has no way of knowing
which apps were effected, and can only start those which it knows should be
there, eg those which it has control of itself.
I could be wrong though, I'd be interested if anyone has a better
explanation or a way to prevent it.
Keith
