Had an XP update pushed to me last night, two .net fixes and an OS security fix. But after these + reboot, about half of the icons in my systray are missing. The processes still start, but no icons.
They are probably doing lackluster/slack QA on these final updates is my guess.
Systray has always had problems. Under XP, I recall several of them would frequently disappear. Under Win7, a similar thing happens with some of them.
With Win7 (it might also work with XP), I can log off (not shut down or restart) and re-log on. That seems to restore most of the missing icons.
Sometimes the icon cache in Windows becomes corrupt and you see wrong icons for different file types. One way to solve the issue is to restart the computer, but you can also rebuild the icons cache without restarting the computer. Here is how :
1.Press the keyboard combination Windows logo key + R to bring up the Run dialog.
2.Type cmd and press Enter to open the command prompt window.
3.In the command prompt window, type the following commands pressing Enter after each line :
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
attrib -H “%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\IconCache.db”
del “%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\IconCache.db”
explorer.exe
4.This would restart the Windows Explorer and rebuild the icons cache as required.
You can also put all these commands into a command script, so you can run it by just double clicking on it.