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Sometimes when you are prompted to restart the computer (or log off), you can get away with just restarting the explorer process. I'm sure you know what i'm talking about.

The problem is, that when you restart explorer, some of the tray icons disappear. My question is, is there any way to restart explorer and keep the icons?

Is it possible to grab the icons with some API for windows? If so, it should be possible to grab them, restart windows, and then register all icons again. Would that be possible?

Are there any workarounds for this?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

The work around is to either bug the vendors for non-broken programs or replace them with programs that work. Explorer has messages that apps are supposed to listen to when the desktop process is restarted or they need to re register their tray icons for any reason. Most programs available today respond correctly and recreate their ready icons when needed.

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and for the ~3 programs that don't , stop thier programs along with the explorer (use a script for the whole thing) and restart them up after restarting the explorer. One shortcut to a small batch file could do it all. I just find that IF I am going to do that, log-on log-off is pretty fast, doesn't it still perform all of those actions? –  Psycogeek Sep 29 '11 at 15:14
@Psycogeek: A log-off/log-on cycle will stop all your programs and then restart them. It'll work for sure. –  afrazier Sep 29 '11 at 15:27
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