Strange Behaviour Of Xp Tray Icons

[doctormann]

Hi Guys

Any thoughts on this one:

I'm running WINXP Pro and generally everything seems OK. The system appears to be clean with no viruses or spyware. However, I have noticed that the tray icons (bottom right of screen - running processes / applications) never seem to appear in the same order. What actually governs the order in which items are loaded at start-up and does the order correspond to the tray positions?

Further to this, on about every 6th start-up, some tray items do not appear at all (and it's not because they are hiding because I've checked). Notably, my bluetooth icon does not appear and it seems that the bluetooth driver has not actually loaded. Likewise the hot-key icon and driver for my Umax scanner. Everything else seems normal and a re-start invariably cures the problem.

I do have the connection suite for my Nokia phone installed (includes bluetooth) but this does not, as far as I am aware, load at start-up so it seems unlikely that this is the problem.

I'm puzzled and hoping that what I am seeing is not the precursor so something serious.

DM

[Mid]

it's an on going fight to keep <deleted> OUT of the sys tray .

check your running services

START > CONTROLL PANNEL > ADMIN TOOLS

[billzant]

I have a similar problem. I put it down to the fact that I use shareware and that there is some kind of incompatibility with Windows. As I am sympathetic to small developers not paying Microsoft's exhorbitant fees I ignore the problem. That is if I am correct.

Hope you are keeping well,

All the Best

Bill Z

[RKASA]

My icons don't always stay in the same order. I think its related to prefeching. and the order in which it thinks things are being used most often.

[nikster]

AFAIK the Nokia PC suite does load at startup and does create one or more sys tray icons.

I always turn off "hide unused system tray icons" because that's causing a lot of confusion. It doesn't really work and ends up hiding random tray items while exposing random other ones. You may give that a try and see if it solves the ordering problem. It can be found somewhere in the task bar properties.