Help! WinXP Power icon dissapearing on power up!

thenew3

Golden Member
Apr 20, 2001
1,207
2
81
This is very strange. I'm running win XP Pro on an older laptop (300mhz P2 IBM thinkpad). while it is not the fastest machine, it runs xp very well and suits my purposes very nice (word, excel, email, web surfing).

One very annoying problem I have is the power icon on the task bar dissapears every time I reboot the machine.
This is not a problem on desktops, but on laptops, it is used to show how much battery life is left etc and for me, it is a very essential too.

I have to go into control panel -> Power options -> Advanced -> Show icon on taskbar and disable it, hit apply, then re-enable it before it will show up on the task bar again.

Or if I log off, then log back on, it will show on the task bar. but the first time you log in after the machine boots up, it does not show up.

Has anyone seen this before? I've tried two laptops and they both do this.
I check microsoft knowledge base and ofcourse they had no info there.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!