Annoyance Re-Booting

[Nick Y]

Strange thing, which I wonder if anyone else has noticed -and perhaps has a solution.

Sometimes when I re boot, I notice that not all the system tray apps start properly. E.G. sometimes Notebook Hardware Control (V2) doesn't show both icons. Similarly other things like MSN (Live Messenger), Essential PIM (free version), Mailbox Dispatcher -to name a few, but others as well.

Never any similar problems starting from cold and yet I thought that a re-boot took you back to just after power on and would then follow through a relatively predefined sequence.

Nothing obvious from Registry Mechanic or other similar tools. No app appears to refuse to start consistently and no error messages or warnings in the Event Viewer. Sometimes I find the service running in the task manger. Strange -to me anyway!

Is this simply an XP professional with SP2 'feature'?
Any suggestions?

(Noticed this on the T43 only; have not been able to check T41p as it is away learning at Uni.)

[K0LO]

XP bug. This one has been around for a long time - I see it sometimes on my desktop machine. You can do a logout/login to fix when it happens. It appears to be fixed in Vista from what I can tell.

[bobstockler]

I've had what I think is a similar problem - on a reboot, some of my
System Tray icons were missing. I would use System Restore to restore
to an earlier point, and it would go through its routine and then tell
me it couldn't restore to that point, and no change was made to my hard
disk - but all of my System Tray icons were back ! ! !

Someone on the AumHa Forums told me that if I would invoke the Task
Manager, stop "explorer.exe" and then restart it, I'd get my icons back.

And it works ! ! !

[Nick Y]

Thanks k0lo and bobstockler; relief to know it is not just me.

[Nick Y]

A bit more...

>>Someone on the AumHa Forums told me that if I would invoke the Task
>>Manager, stop "explorer.exe" and then restart it, I'd get my icons back. ...

Doesn't seem to start everything (e.g. Power Manager)

>>XP bug. This one has been around for a long time...

The link was excellent in explaining the problem. Found a few possible solutions and ended up with the free Startup Delayer. Using it to delay a few start ups and that seems to solve the problem.


Thanks to you both k0lo and bobstockler.

[boofoo]

I've found that deleting the icon cache then rebooting can solve this, as described here: http://www.tweakxp.com/article37003.aspx.