2 identical wireless systray icons, one faulty; help?

[hydrostarr]

After reinstalling my WinXP parition on my T41, I see that my wireless-ethernet systray icon (which when double-clicked shows a "Wire Connection Status" dialog window; when single-clicked shows a pop-up menu to control on/off state, power mode, etc) is duplicated--ie, it shows up twice. One of the icons is "faulty" in that if you click on it in any way, its process eventually crashes (and Windows asks if I want to send the crash results somewhere for analysis, as per the typical Windows annoyance), and it bothers me no longer. The other icon/process works as expected. Essentially, it's a cosmetic problem, although I fear it could cause issues down the road (and I try to keep my Windows boxes as immaculate as possible so as to avoid the general poor-performance creep that tends to infect Windows OSes, per my experience).

Basically, it appears that this wirless-connection-admin software/gizmo runs twice at startup when it should not.

Any idea on how I can rectify this so that one and only one starts up?

The best thing I've seen thus far is to run CrapCleaner (aka CCleaner) and manage the startup-process control window/gizmo/settings. Problem is, I don't know which process/program-path to delete, because their file/path names are not particularly informative.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[GomJabbar]

I would imagine a good registry cleaner program would find the problem entry for you and give you the option to delete it.

[hydrostarr]

I would imagine a good registry cleaner program would find the problem entry for you and give you the option to delete it.

For what it's worth, I've run both Regvac and CCleaner (aka "CrapCleaner") registry cleans multiple times and the symptoms persist. Would anyone recommend additional regisry-cleaning tools?

[saux]

try system mechanic

[RealBlackStuff]

The easiest way to clean startup entries in the registry is:
in Regedit do a search for 'runonce', then check the contents of the 'Run' key above it. A double entry should be quickly spotted. Repeat 'find' with F3 until you've seen them all.

[hydrostarr]

The easiest way to clean startup entries in the registry is:
in Regedit do a search for 'runonce', then check the contents of the 'Run' key above it. A double entry should be quickly spotted. Repeat 'find' with F3 until you've seen them all.

I found this suggestion to be quite useful, thanks. I found the offending file/process:

C:\Program Files\ThinkPad\ConnectUtilities\ACWLIcon.exe

The above file ran at startup and caused problems, while this file/process also ran at startup without noticable issue:

C:\Program Files\ThinkPad\ConnectUtilities\QCWLICON.EXE

I deleted ACWLIcon.exe from the startup registry.

Later on, I found an app which seems to handle Windows auto-startup-process quite well:

http://www.get-in-control.com/
app name: InControl

Great view of the list of startup apps/processes. It also has a history manager which will alow one to rollback to a previous rev of startup list (eg, if one deletes something that later they discovered they needed). Further, it sees more of the startup list than regedit-"runonce" searching (as per the suggestion above) does, for InControl looks in the "Startup" folders of "Documents and Settings" fame, and regedit appears not to catch this stuff.

All in all, I'm looking forward to my Windows box behaving better. Thanks all for the suggestions and the assistance.

-Matt

[hydrostarr]

One additional note:

When running the regedit-"runonce" search, check the "match whole word only" box, for if you don't, you may find a bunch of matches that is not what you seek.

[hydrostarr]

And another point:

The InControl app (listed above) also appears to catch "runservice" registry entries, which also seems helpful. The "Category Tree" view provided by InControl shows this stuff--quite informative.