This is NOT them just behing hidden! Power icons and others missing from taskbar

[ELViking]

Hi,
I have a Toshiba laptop, runnin Win XP Home Ed.
Most of the time my power icons for my battery/AC power
and sometimes other icons, do not show up in the taskbar.
I have many times checked to make sure that they are set
to be displayed, and they definitely are. Things like my
power icons are kind of important. I can get them to
display by unchecking the 'display icon in task..' and
clicking 'apply' and then rechecking the box and
clicking 'apply'. However, this is really rather annoying
as when I first got the laptop, all icons would display,
but of course a week or so later this stopped happening,
and I'm getting sick of it.
Anybody got any idea how to fix this rather annoying
Windows bad habit?

Thanks in advance.

 

[t@k]

Hi ELViking,

In microsoft.public.windowsxp.general you remarked...

Hi,
I have a Toshiba laptop, runnin Win XP Home Ed.
Most of the time my power icons for my battery/AC power
and sometimes other icons, do not show up in the taskbar.
I have many times checked to make sure that they are set
to be displayed, and they definitely are. Things like my
power icons are kind of important. I can get them to
display by unchecking the 'display icon in task..' and
clicking 'apply' and then rechecking the box and
clicking 'apply'. However, this is really rather annoying
as when I first got the laptop, all icons would display,
but of course a week or so later this stopped happening,
and I'm getting sick of it.
Anybody got any idea how to fix this rather annoying
Windows bad habit?

By your tone it sounds like you have asked for advice on this before, but
not knowing what advice you were given, I can only state what you may
already been told...

Right click on a blank area of the task bar... in the menu click on
Properties, in the resulting dialog, ensure "Hide inactive icons" is
unchecked.

HTH

 

[Guest]

sorry mate, but did i not just say that its NOT that the
bloody icons are hidden?

 

[t@k]

Hi (e-mail address removed),

In microsoft.public.windowsxp.general you remarked...

sorry mate, but did i not just say that its NOT that the
bloody icons are hidden?

You just gonna kick and scream till someone fixes it for you... well up
your's... hope it causes you endless frustration.

 

[Sharon F]

Anybody got any idea how to fix this rather annoying
Windows bad habit?

It's a flaw in XP. The systray area is a bit fragile at times. There are
many workarounds available but have yet to see a solid solution.

Log off/log on is one workaround that I'll use. It gives the icons another
chance at loading (without the balance of the O/S and user preferences
loading at the same time).

Also, I've noticed that allowing certain programs to place their icons in
the tray can cause the erratic tray icon behavior to appear. If I change a
setting barring that icon from appearing, the problem goes away.

The setting I change is *not* the Always Hide in Taskbar> Notifcations.
It's the one within the program that allows or disallows the display of a
tray icon. If not available, I've disabled the program from loading at
startup entirely.

It takes some experimenting and patience to see which icons you can load
and keep loaded. If using only Windows tray icons (no others), they tend to
stay put. Can use that as a starting point to add the other icons back in.

One thing I've wondered about and haven't tried is a third party tray
program. The ones that were popular with older versions of Windows and let
the user run any program from the tray area. Maybe let Windows handle the
windows icons and use one of these tray programs for the rest? I would
think that someone has updated one of those programs for use with XP by
now....

 

[Daniel L. Belton]

It's a flaw in XP. The systray area is a bit fragile at times. There are
many workarounds available but have yet to see a solid solution.

Log off/log on is one workaround that I'll use. It gives the icons another
chance at loading (without the balance of the O/S and user preferences
loading at the same time).

Also, I've noticed that allowing certain programs to place their icons in
the tray can cause the erratic tray icon behavior to appear. If I change a
setting barring that icon from appearing, the problem goes away.

The setting I change is *not* the Always Hide in Taskbar> Notifcations.
It's the one within the program that allows or disallows the display of a
tray icon. If not available, I've disabled the program from loading at
startup entirely.

It takes some experimenting and patience to see which icons you can load
and keep loaded. If using only Windows tray icons (no others), they tend to
stay put. Can use that as a starting point to add the other icons back in.

One thing I've wondered about and haven't tried is a third party tray
program. The ones that were popular with older versions of Windows and let
the user run any program from the tray area. Maybe let Windows handle the
windows icons and use one of these tray programs for the rest? I would
think that someone has updated one of those programs for use with XP by
now....

This is one thing that really gets me... Why do all of the program
designers think that I want their program to run at startup and stay
running all of the time in the system tray? I want very few programs
loading at startup so the first thing I do after installing an
application is to set it so that it doesn't load...