Explorer Taskbar Problems

[oneluckygirl972]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help...for several months now I have been having issues with my explorer taskbar. My active program icons are all invisible except for the power, network, volume, and time icons. Those ones are in the appropriate spots. If I hover over where the other icons are supposed to be, the names of the programs pop up over my mouse, and they can be clicked on and ran from there. I also get big broken gaps in my taskbar where I can see the desktop through the taskbar, and my minimized program buttons sometimes duplicate as well.

I am running Vista Ultimate x64 on an HP Pavilion Dv7 laptop, and I have tried several different solutions, such as:

Clearing the Icon Cache (this occasionally has worked as a temporary fix where some of the icons come back, but it doesn't stay fixed and not all of the icons become visible.)
Going into the task manager and ending/restarting explorer.exe
Running a Vundo Virus check and removal tool (Vundo was not detected by my system)
Going into my toolbar properties and ensuring that no icons are hidden
Logging off and then logging back in (this was suggested in another forum and actually worked temporarily, but the taskbar was messed up again the next time I booted.)

Any other ideas other than these? I would appreciate any help.

Thanks,
Christine

 

[richc46]

Christine
I think that you mean the notification bar, bottom right near the clock
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/106787-notification-area-system-icons.html

 

[oneluckygirl972]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I am referring to the notification area, but as I mentioned in my post, my system icons are visible and working fine. (Power, Volume, Network, and Clock.) The link that you posted for me seems to help resolve issues where those particular ones are hidden or not showing, and I have already been in there several times to verify that everything is as it should be. The ones that are invisible are for all the other programs that are running and used to have visible icons in the notification area. In my case this is usually Roboform, Windows Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Norton, Adobe Acrobat 8.0, and whatever else I happen to have running at the time.

Any other thoughts or suggestions on what might help? Any advice is appreciated.

Christine

 

[richc46]

See if a reset may help

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/99008-notification-icons-reset.html
Perhaps this is what you have already tried

 

[Lorien]

Download, install, and run CCleaner: Piriform - Download CCleaner, Defraggler, Recuva, Speccy - Millions of users worldwide!. Then see the following and make sure the tray notification cache box (highlighted below) is checked (along with any others you care to do at the same time or uncheck any others you don't want to do). Then reboot. See if that helps:



I hope this helps. It helped someone else here who had the exact same problem.

Good luck!