System Tray failure

[papilio]

Hi all,

My Dell XPS 410, running WinXP, has a problem (or at least an annoyance) which seems to be getting worse. Very often -- maybe even most of the time lately -- half or more of my system tray icons fail to appear, even though the programs are running. It's very inconsistent, sometimes it's fine, at worst only 2 or 3 of the expected dozen or so make it. And the whole startup program-loading is really bogging down.

I know that it's software related of course, as all is fine when I boot up to my back-up WinXP OS on another partition. But *where* is the glitch??

I scan constantly for viruses, trojans, spyware and all, and also keep the registry clean and defragged.

It would be great if any of you might have some ideas for things I should look for, as any day now I'm going to decide to just bite the bullet and do a clean re-install of Windows. Everything's backed up, of course, but it will take days to re-install all the programs and configure everything again.

I'd be so grateful for any suggestions any of you could pass by me.

Cheers,
papilio

 

[kniht]

See if this is of any help:

http://winhlp.com/node/16

 

[Tufenuf]

papilio, Go to the link below and under the letter "N" scroll down to "Notification Area - Icons Disappearing" where you'll find some possible solutions. The "Disable SSDP and uPNP Services" reg file fix many times solves the problem. To use the Regedits: Save the REG File to your hard disk. Double click it and answer yes to the import prompt.

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_abc.htm

In Windows XP the System Tray area is called the Notification area.

Tufenuf

 

[Elvandil]

Do you have SP2 installed?

 

[papilio]

You guys are amazing -- led me straight to the solution! kniht sent me to a great article regarding this problem -- which turns out to be a rather widespread but very interesting mystery -- and as instructed, I did the log off and on again thing, and they all came back (!), which was said to be the indicator that the problem is indeed with the UPnP. But just as I was about to turn it off through Network Places, I got Tufenuf's reply and went to "Notification Area - Icons Disappearing" on the site he suggested. One of the items there told me to first remove any obsolete icons in "Hide active icons | Customize". I didn't even have to look to know that I had a *ton* of old icons listed there, so I ran the script to delete them.

Now things start to get a little strange -- that didn't fix the problem at all, but it absolutely brought my computer back to life! It's hard to say that I've ever seen it so snappy and responsive. Wonderful!

Next, instead of turning the UPnP thing off in Network Places, I used the reg hack to do the same thing.

Problem solved.

. . . But . . . could this just be a perfectly timed coincidence? -- when at last I had things back and better than I can remember, I soon noticed that my nVidia card had lost every bit of its ability to anti-alias. And I know it was just fine earlier this afternoon. Any ideas on this one? I reversed the reg change, still no good -- well unless anyone has any ideas on *this* one, I guess I'll try reinstalling the card's driver.

None-the-less, I am still impressed and grateful that those of you who replied had a pretty good idea what was going on.

Thanks!
papilio