Taskbar ghost icons

[googlemad]

This is a weird one and seems to only affect machines deployed with SCCM as our 32 Bit machines don't do it

 

Anyway in the Windows 7 taskbar blank ghost icons seem to be present. They don't do anything when clicked and can vary from one to lots (an extreme example is attached!). Annoyingly this also prevents some of the other icons from being 'clickable' for some reason including quite an important one - volume control

 

I've also noticed the 'Network' icon should be present but isn't so the mystery deepens!

 

Has anyone come across this before?

 

[6Foot2]

I remember something similar with XP. After XP resumed from running a screensaver we would see items in the taskbar that were blank [not tied to or associated with any process or program] We could dismiss these 'phantoms' by clicking on them. We never found out what caused them, apart from going into and out of a screensaver, and we never found a solution.

 

More recently we sometimes see the wrong icon displayed when a program is running [eg: The Word icon in the taskbar when Internet Explorer is running] I think this is something to do with the icon cache but as it is a relatively small issue I have not pursued solving this for network users until more users complain [weight of work/other things to be done]

[googlemad]

Still got a problem with this, as mentioned previously the network icon is just a 'ghost' blank icon, the volume control is present but you can't left or right click on it causing a bit of a problem as it means people can't adjust the volume very easily on their machines!

 

Any ideas?

[psydii]

We had this. It didn't affect the machines to begin with. Then eventually any machine imaged would suffer from it.

 

Solution: We rebuilt the images. Not specifically to solve this, but to better optimise deployment and startup times. Problem hasn't occurred on the new image. I suspect it may be driver related, or due to some software that expects to be unique on the network that was misconfigured in the original build.

[googlemad]

Bingo!

 

Using CCleaner and ticking only the option 'Tray Notifications Cache' resolves the issue, my network icon is back and the ghosts have vanished. Now I just need to find a way to do whatever process CCleaner does via a login script or something!

[googlemad]

The following seems to do the trick as a batch file attached to a computer policy 'Shutdown' action

 

taskkill /im explorer.exe /f

reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify" /v IconStreams /f

reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify" /v PastIconsStream /f

start "Shell Restarter" /d "%systemroot%" /i /normal explorer.exe