hide inactive icons not working

[davexnet]

Hi - anybody know how this works?
Everything was fine, then all of a sudden all icons (that are associated with
running programs) are active in the lower-right notification area.

The little < button that revealed the hidden items is not present.

I right clicked the task bar/properties/ "hide inactive icons" is selected.

I clicked on "customize", there are at least a 100 entries, all set to
"hide when inactive" . Can I reset this list? Where are they stored (couldn't find
anything in the registry).

I checked other user accounts on the same PC, same problem their.

 

[Elixer]

Which OS you talking about ?

 

[Ketchup]

Are you talking about the notification area?

 

[denis280]

if its windows 7 there you go.http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/13102-notification-area-icons-reset.html

 

[davexnet]

Not Windows 7 (but 'll check the link anyway) but XP / notification area.

I found out how to get rid of the old entries
(customize button to the right of "hide inactive items") - you delete the entries "IconStreams" and "PastIconStream" from the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify

Then you open Task Manager and stop and restart the Explorer.exe process.

Now, there are only 4 or 5 icons in the "customize" area, instead of about 100.
However, so far, it has not restored the missiong fuctionality - ie. the icons
are all visible nothing is hiding automatically as they should

Just checked out the Windows 7 article posted earlier - it's basically the same process
as the REG mod I mentioned. I tried to remember what was going on in the PC
before I noticed this issue - the only thing I can remember doing was a defrag.
On the off chance there was a corrupted file somewhere, I ran the command
SFC /scannow, but no errors were found. Like-wise with CHKDSK.

I found another post where somebody reported the condition started after doing a
defrag - however, setting an item to "always hide" restarting the PC and setting it
back to "hide when inactive" - it only holds until the *next* time you boot,
then it's back to all icons showing at once.
http://help.lockergnome.com/windows...rty-task-bar-work-anymore--ftopict450908.html

EDIT - It started working after doing nothing for more that 24 hours.
I tried a few more things. I used tweakUI to reset the icons. I went into Desktop properties/
themes and set a new theme then set it back to default; I used Subinacl to reset the registry permissions.
After about two hours, it started working.