Notification Area Icons Missing in Vista

When you start your Windows Vista computer, the Volume Control icon may be missing from the Notification area. Also, in the Taskbar properties – Notification tab, the checkboxes for Clock, Volume and Network may remain grayed out.

Simply logging off and logging on to your user account helps in most cases, if this is not caused by a Policy setting. Alternately, you may try terminating and restarting Explorer.exe to see if that works. If that does not help (and your computer is not part of a domain), use the instructions below to unlock the Notification area icons.

Registry Fix

Download trayicons.reg and save to Desktop. Right-click on the file and choose Merge. Click Yes when prompted for confirmation.

Note that the previously mentioned REG file removes the following Registry-based Policy values in your system:

  • HideSCAVolume
  • HideSCANetwork
  • HideClock
  • HideSCAPower

Additionally, it clears the IconStreams & PastIconsStream values as suggested in Microsoft KB945011.

Important: After running the .REG file, you need to terminate and restart Explorer.exe for the change to take effect.

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33 Responses to “Notification Area Icons Missing in Vista” Subscribe to comments!

  1. dddwsdss
    said this on Thursday, July 9th 2009 9:16 pm

    The registry fix solved it for me, this should really be propagated around some other sites as I know that people still have this issue unresolved.

  2. Marios
    said this on Monday, June 29th 2009 2:52 am

    Hi, the solution “terminating and restarting Explorer.exe” really did the job, thanks a lot!!!

  3. Sandeep
    said this on Sunday, May 24th 2009 12:20 pm

    Dave, after doing this you need to right click on
    task bar >properties>Notification Area>Check all system icon…

    That really work.. thank you very much Mr. Ramesh Srinivasan you rock.

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