Missing System Icons on Notification Area

Every once in a while you may encounter this error of not having the system icons on notification area. It usually happens after waking Windows from sleep mode or if you have restarted your computer just after a fresh start up.

This is not a permanent problem as the icons came back after a restart but if you do not want to wait for that you can easily solve it by yourself.

Here is how to do it:

1-Open regedit (Win+R / Regedit)

2-Navigate to following subkey:

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

3-Delete both IconStreams and PastIconStream keys.

4-Close regedit

5-Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Del)

6-On processes tab find explorer.exe and kill it (or if you are using an alternative task manager like System Explorer you can restart it)

7-Go to file / New Process / type in explorer.exe and OK

Your icons will reappear.

VLC Subtitle Encoding

If all you are seeing is gibberish characters as subtitles in VLC, you are probably using the wrong encoding. For example this is what I get when I load a Bulgarian subtitle:

Here is how to solve this problem:

Tools / preferences / subtitles & OCD / default encoding

from there change the encoding to match the subtitle language, in my case I have to change it to Cyrillic, since Bulgarian alphabet consists of Cyrillic characters.

For Western European languages UTF-8 encoding is fine

You will need to reload the subtitles for changes to take effect.