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.

As you can see from the picture above (don’t mind the language its Turkish, but you can understand there are updates for my Windows) there are 6 important and 5 optional updates.

But when I click to updates to select them individually it goes blank, I can see there are updates but can’t see what are they about.

So how do we solve this?

First open your task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del), then find explorer.exe then kill the process.

Then go to file / open new process (run) / type “explorer.exe” (without the quotation marks) to restart it. Open Windows Update again. As you can see from the screenshot below our problem is solved and we can see all the updates individually.

I previously post a list of free and advanced task manager replacements. Here is my favorite one on that list: System Explorer. It has a lot of features that are missing on the default task managers, some of them being:
* Detailed information about Tasks, Processes, Startups, IE Add-ons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files
* Easy check of suspicious files via VirusTotal service.
* Easy search details about file/process via online databases
* Easy access to System Utilities
* Performance graphs for monitoring usage of system resources in time
* Action History for monitoring processes activities
* Making of System Snapshots for easy finding of system changes.
* Multiple language support (English, Espanol, Deutsch, Portuguese, Japanese)

download (it has a portable version too)

For old time sake here is a screenshot from my old XP.

Look closely for total process number and memory usage.

Task Manager is the mighty killer of hanging of programs, the hero who comes to your CTRL+ALT+DEL calls, but it has some weaknesses.

The default Windows Task Manager lacks functionality that is needed sometimes. You can’t see which process started applications, process associations etc. One other important advantage of using these alternative task managers is that you can use them on restricted user accounts if the administrator has disabled the default task manager.

There are many applications that you can replace with default task manager.
Personally I use System Explorer. But there are tons of other task managers you can use.
Some of the most popular ones:

Process Explorer (portable) from Microsoft

ProcessHacker (open source-portable)

The Anvir Task Manager

ProcX (portable)

Related posts:

Restart Explorer When Windows Hangs

One of the most popular source of annoyance in Windows is hanging of the explorer. We will not get into the causes of this problem because there are many possible issues.
Here is a simple solution (at least temporary) for that problem but this will only work if Windows is still responsive.

Shut down the Windows Explorer by hitting Start => Shutdown (Turn off Computer on Windows XP) and click cancel on the shutdown dialog while holding the CTRL, Shift and ALT keys.

This kills the explorer.exe process and all that we have to do now is create a new explorer.exe process to access all windows and functions again in Windows.
Then fire up task manager, click on File => New Task and enter explorer.exe in the window. This will restart the Windows Explorer and hopefully brought the desired result.

You can open the Task manager with CTRL + ALT + DEL . (or Ctrl + Shift + Esc).
msdn
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