Thinkpad battery icon disappears on explorer restart

[noetus]

Anyone know why? If I have to kill explorer.exe for any reason and restart it (sadly this is more often than I would like, in Vista) the battery icon on the taskbar, the big green one, will disappear. Logging out and in again fixes this. Anyone know if this can be fixed more permanently?

Incidentally, the main reason why I have to do this is because occasionally some of the expected tray icons do not show up, especially the volume and/or network icons. Looking in the tray notification options shows these grayed out, so they can't be reenabled. Restarting Windows does not always fix this. This is a known bug that amazingly remained in all the service pack iterations of XP and now shows up in Vista, as well. (Do the guys at Redmond actually do anything all day long?) Here is a fix, which unfortunately kills the battery icon on my machine (because it involves restarting explorer):

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify]
"ValueToBeRemoved"=-IconStreams

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify]
"ValueToBeRemoved"=-PastIconsStream

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

start explorer.exe

The easiest is to put then in a batch file and execute all at once.