Mystery of the Missing Icons

History:

The Notification Area ( formerly the System Tray)  of the Task Bar usually contains a set of standard icons.  Other icons may be present depending on other programs you have installed.   Included in the standard icons are the Volume Control and, on a laptop, an Electric/Battery icon.  Also, when external hardware is attached, an icon with a green arrow appears and should be used for “Removing Hardware Safely”.

 

One morning our computer woke up with  all three of them missing.   Over the next few weeks, those three icons would appear and disappear at random, sometimes all together, usually one or two would be missing.   The Volume icon was not a great concern. “Remove Hardware Safely” was.  The icon which indicated the laptop was running on electric or battery was important as once in a while we would forget to plug in the laptop and had no indication until the low battery warning came on.

 

Solution One :

1.       The Volume control and Power indicator icons were easy.  We went to Control Panel and went through the normal ‘Send a Shorcut on Desktop’ routine.  Now they were easily accessible but not quite as handy as the Notification Area icons. 

2.       Nowhere could I find anything about the ‘Remove Hardware Safely’  icon or another way of performing this task.   So, my solution was to write and ask John Polich.

3.       John presented this problem to the KK one  Tuesday and no one seemed to hear of or had ever had the problem. 

 

Solution Two:

             Google it!  I ran several variations through Google but nothing seemed to fit.  For a few weeks, I would check a few Google web site suggestions each day.  Persistence paid off!    On the same day, I came across two web sites, each with a different approach toward solving the problem.  Below are excerpts from each of the web sites

First lucky find.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=859653

Forum contains conversations between Mike (who has the problem of missing icons)  and

Rainold (who found a solution).

Partial but pertinent conversations quoted verbatim from this web site from entries April -  May  2005. 

 

By Rainold - (my comments in bold  italics)(Basic Necessary information in Red Bold)

Mike,
As to the "Remove hardware .."
It took me a verrrrry long time and discussions in several online-forums and newsgroups until in a discussion in the Armada forum we found a solution.

I. Basics
Main problem was to detect which programm has to be run for starting the applet.
It is HOTPLUG.dll
It can be executed through RUNDLL.exe using the parameters
shell32.dll, Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
You may try it out from
Start| run:
"%windir%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll"

II. Way to use it easily
1.) Create a link on the desktop

( Took me a while to figure out that Rainold is using Link for Shortcut.  There is a create Shortcut on the Right Click Desktop menu.)

 

a) Desktop, right-click, -> New -> Link
b) In the applet
     - as "Target:" enter the above quoted string (without quotes);
     - enter a name for the Link (f.e. "Hotplug" or "Remove Hardware").
The Link will appear on the Desktop.

c) Change the link's properties (right-click, Properties):
     - for "Excute in:" enter %windir%
     - change the icon (using button), navigate to the "Windows" folder, select            "hotplug.dll there and pick the icon from there.


Save the settings
Now you can use the tool from the desktop.

2.) Put the link on the "QuickStart" list:
Just drag the link from the desktop to the "QuickStart" section of the TaskBar.
Thereafter it will appear on the list of program on the QuickStart list and will alway be within reach.

Hope this helps
Rainald
P.S. I attach my LNK-file. Maybe its gets over and works

 

Hi Rainald,
Aha, I finally get to download the attachment. The last time, I tried a couple of times but the attachment wasn't there. So, I never came back to ITRC to get the file.

Now that I have the .lnk file, the remove h/w icon shows up! it's working super!
The zipped file is attached to  the last April 20th  message from Rainold on the web site quoted above.  When  downloaded and unzipped, a shortcut called Hardware entfernen with the remove hardware safely icon is extracted.  When executed, a window with attached hardware, both external and the internal A:\ are listed.  Click on the hardware to be removed safely.  A) the 'Remove Hardware Safely'  message is generated, and B) the 'Remove Hardware Safely'  icon appears in the notification area.  The shortcut must be executed whenever the 'Remove Hardware Safely'  icon is missing and it is necessary to 'Remove Hardware Safely' .  Other .dll files which can be executed in a similar manner are included on this web site..

http://chagdali.free.fr/dcs/RunDll.htm

 

 

 

NOW - From a web site I neglected to save.  (And this solution was the one that worked for us.  All icons have shonw up in Notification area regularly.)

2004-11-11 – Francesco Saverio Ostuni wrote: "... I found a solution for me that works perfectly. I simply went to My network Places and on the left pane I chose to Hide UPnP devices. This operation does not disable the service (which I need)."

Further he mentioned that the same can be done through Control Panel, Add or Remove Programs, on the left side: Add/Remove Windows components; select Networking Services, click on the Details... button, remove the checkmark for the UPnP User Interface, then click on OK. The result is the same. Now the icons are back every time at each reboot.

This has meanwhile been confirmed by many other users and consistently kept a success rate of well over 90%, so we can conclude that this solves the problem on all but the most unusual Windows XP installations.

Thanks, Francesco, in the name of the many systray users you've made happy!

Apparently this option is only there after Service Pack 2 is installed. I'm not sure whether and how this would work in Windows XP installations without SP2.

It is as yet unclear what exactly the UPnP User Interface does, beside opening two ports. Any information is welcome.

Several people including myself suspect that the UPnP interface does not directly cause the problem, instead there seems to be something wrong with the load order or timing. Perhaps the UPnP interface hogs the system in a way that blocks the systray for too long on some computers.

(Further discussions on this web site also discuss ‘timing problems’ and how to circumvent.  None seemed like they were simple or fixed the problem for a great number of users.)