Taskbar Icons Disappearing!!!

#1 James92581

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Posted 04 January 2002 - 11:54 AM

Ok, this is pretty strange, although I've heard of the same occurrences with other people (I should've paid attention and found out the solution!! urrgg). What happens is that some of the icons in the taskbar (ie. AIM icon) do not show up when I run them. It stopped happening a few days ago, and now it's back. Maybe it'll go away, but I hope to fix it soon. Thanks in advance.

#2 RoninCS

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Posted 04 January 2002 - 05:05 PM

There's an inactive icon setting for the taskbar. Right click on the taskbar, select properties and play around there. You'll find it there.

#3 James92581

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Posted 04 January 2002 - 10:24 PM

Oh I should have mentioned this problem in detail. The icons don't appear at all on the taskbar, even if I click the "show hidden icons" button. When I first heard of this problem, I thought people just didn't know WinXP had the feature. But it turned out that the OS actually doesn't show some of the icons in the taskbar. As for my problem, the icons are showing up now after a reboot. However, I still don't know what causes this strange behavior.

#4 clutch

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Posted 04 January 2002 - 10:48 PM

Are you talking about the "Show Quick Launch" option in Task Bar properties?

#5 Xiven

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Posted 05 January 2002 - 03:11 AM

It's a well known bug in XP. There have been several topics on disappearing system tray icons on this forum. Try doing a search.

As I recall, some people solved it by waiting for all disk activity to finish before logging on.

Hope this helps

#6 James92581

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Posted 05 January 2002 - 08:48 AM

oh yes! i knew there were some topics regarding this matter here. i tried searching for "taskbar icons" and found none. duh...system tray icons...doh

thanks xiven.

#7 Shakedown

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Posted 06 January 2002 - 09:41 PM

I've had Explorer (NOT INTERNET EXPLORER or WINDOWS EXPLORER) crash and restart on it's own a few times. Not all the tray icons reappear. The apps are still running though, as seen in task manager applications and processes.

If you leave your PC on all the time this may be happening when you are not on it.

Explorer is still used as the desktop interface.

To test, go into Task Manager and kill the explorer.exe process. If it doesn't auto restart, may take a minute or two, goto to Applications tab and press new task. Type explorer and hit enter. The desktop will reappear with some tray icons missing.