How to Fix Broken System Tray Icons in Windows 10

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Easy fix for an annoying issue hitting Windows 10 as well

The system tray area is an important part of the desktop, as it shows you the apps that are running minimized without eating up space on the taskbar.

This Windows feature has been there forever, and it is one of the things many people wouldn’t be able to use the operating system without at all.

I personally use the system tray without hiding any icons there, as I always want to have quick access to apps running in the background. Plus, I like to keep things organized on my desktop, so the system tray is basically the home of just a handful of apps on my computer.

Windows 10, however, appears to be suffering from a system tray issue that I remember being experienced more often in the Windows Vista days.

Basically, some icons in the tray no longer show up, though they are still there and eat up a blank space without actually letting you do anything. In some cases, clicking this empty space actually brings forward the options that the app icon would normally display, only that the icon itself isn’t available.

Fortunately, fixing this bug is quite easy and the same workaround as on the other Windows version does the trick here too.

 

The first step is to actually create a backup of your system because the hack involves making changes to the Windows Registry, so if something goes wrong, system stability could be impacted.

Launch the Windows Registry Editor by simply clicking the Start menu and typing regedit.exe. You can also create a backup of the Windows Registry from File > Export. Then, navigate to the following path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

If you’re running Windows 10 version 1803 (April 2018 Update) or newer, you can just copy the path above and paste it into the address bar in the Registry Editor.

What you need to do here is to delete two registry entries called IconStreams and PastIconsStream. If just one of them exist, that’s fine, remove it and you’re good to go.

 

Next, you can just reboot the system, but Microsoft recommends killing the explorer.exe process and then re-launching it. Once the system tray icons load, the aforementioned registry items that you just deleted should be recreated automatically.

To kill the explorer.exe process, press CTRL + Shift + mouse right click on the Taskbar and click the option that reads Exit Explorer. You should notice that the taskbar goes away, leaving you with a desktop that has no taskbar.

Next, press CTRL + Alt + Delete and then go to the Task Manager and click on File > Run New Task. Type explorer.exe and hit OK, and the taskbar should be reloaded, with the icons in the system tray area also showing up.

If everything was done correctly, the tray icons should be now displayed correctly after the said registry items are recreated.

In Windows 10, you can configure which icons to show up in the system tray right from the Settings app. The options that let you do this are available at the following location:

Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Select which icons appear on the taskbar

Clicking the Always show all icons in the notification area toggle will remove the little arrow in the system tray hiding inactive icons and instead show you all icons here.

If the same issue keeps reappearing on your Windows 10 system, you can perform the workaround as many times you want, though in this case you should also investigate more to determine what’s causing the bug. Refreshing the Windows installation could help you deal with such potential problems.

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