Fix missing or grayed out system icons in Windows Vista
Posted February 9, 2010 – 12:03 pm
The system icons in the notification area of my taskbar keep disappearing. It happens quite randomly – and fixes itself equally randomly.
Tray icons missing or grayed out
In my case, the missing icons are usually one or all of the volume icon, the network icon, or the power icon. The clock icon always shows up for some reason.
When I try to re-enable them, they are often grayed out and I cannot check the boxes. Sometimes, they aren’t gray.
After some googling, I found a solution to this missing tray icons problem – though apparently not a permanent one.
This page provides a recap of Microsoft’s official method for fixing the problem. It involves going into your registry keys, deleting the ‘iconstreams’ keys, and then restarting explorer.exe (which runs the taskbar / start menu). The fix works for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
I tried this method a couple of weeks ago – and it worked! — for a while. Unfortunately, here we are a couple weeks later and my icons are graying out one by one. Now back to where I started.
I guess what is happening is that the registry keys are getting corrupted over time.
So that means I need a repeatable way to fix this problem – ideally one that doesn’t require a system reboot as the Diurnal / Samuel’s blog methods do. System reboots just take too much time.
My new, improved methodology is as follows: download and use Microsoft’s ‘Fix it’ program which repairs the missing tray icons problem. You can download this little program off Microsoft Windows 7 missing tray icon help page.
I have saved this mini-program to my desktop and now can run it anytime I start seeing grayed out tray icons.
This method has several advantages:
1. I don’t have to mess around with registry keys.
2. It creates a ‘restore point’ during the repair procedure. This adds a measure of safety.
3. It doesn’t require a full system reboot.
4. It involves fewer steps.
One thing I have noticed is that after running the Fix it program is that the icons are not always re-enabled. In such case, I have to take a couple of extra steps:
1. Stop and restart explorer.exe as shown in step #8 of Microsoft’s manual repair process as follows:
8. Restart the Explorer.exe process. To do these, follow these steps:
- Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.
- On the Processes tab in Task Manager, click the explorer.exe process, and then click End Process two times.
- On the File menu, click New Tasks (Run), type explorer, and then click OK.
2. Recheck the missing tray icons: right click on taskbar / menu bar, choose ‘properties’, choose ‘notification area’ tab, recheck missing system icons, click ‘ok’.
For me, I’ve found this makes things right again – and is as close to a permanent solution as I’ve found.
