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Q: I have a problem that was frequent for a while, and I was about to ask you about it.  It then went away.  For a long time I haven’t seen it.  Now, suddenly it’s back and I can’t figure out why.  I’m running Vista on a Toshiba Satellite laptop.  The icons in the Taskbar Notification Area are driving me crazy.  I prefer to have the Clock, Power, Network, and Volume icons on all the time.  I have never lost the clock display, it’s rock solid.  The other three are intermittent.  Occasionally when I boot Vista they will not appear, and if I try to turn the missing one(s) on they are greyed out so I can’t.  Sometimes it’s one, sometimes two of them are missing and disabled.  Once it was all three.  It’s random which ones.  How do I keep Vista from deciding to randomly disable these icons?

– Bill B.
Niceville, Fla.

A: I have actually experienced this same problem, Bill (thanks, Bill!  No, not YOU, Bill – the OTHER Bill, from Redmond, Washington.)  Before I go on to discuss the problem, let me first of all congratulate you on knowing the proper name for this area.  For many years I incorrectly referred to it as the “System Tray” and even some errant Microsoft documentation incorrectly uses that name.  I now have it from an authoritative source that the correct name is, in fact, what you called it: the Taskbar Notification Area.

This area was originally intended for drivers, system utilities and such programs that do not have a traditional window associated with them to have a place reserved where they could pop-up simple status information to the user.  The area has been usurped by many application developers to display an icon for minimized windows.  This has a tendency to clutter-up the area, making it harder to see the icons you actually want to see.  Because of this, starting in Windows XP, Microsoft started giving users the ability to hide “unused icons”, although how the system determines whether an icon is “unused” is a complete mystery to me. Starting in Vista, Microsoft split the functionality of the Notification Area between “System Icons” (which are Clock, Volume, Network, and Power), and application icons (everything else).  There is a special tab on the Taskbar Properties dialog that allows you to enable/disable these icons individually, but even this sometimes will not restore the icons (thanks A LOT, Bill! – and you wonder why people didn’t like Vista?).  When this happens, the method you need to use to fix it involves going deep into the System Registry and making a couple of changes.  This can be intimidating to many users, and rightly so, since haphazard editing of the registry can easily render your system unbootable.  Therefore, be especially careful before continuing.  Space limitations on my column prevent me from giving the actual details of the fix, but I found a website that has a very comprehensive description of exactly what you need to do.  You can find it by entering tinyurl.com/aatbgo into your browser. These URLs sometimes don’t print correctly in the newspaper, so please remember that the URL does not have a period at the end, or any embedded spaces or hyphens.  If you can’t get to the site, please just write to me and ask for the link, and I’ll send it right over to you.

Until next week – good luck, and happy computing!