I disagree somewhat. If all you want to do is refresh your desktop, then no, endtasking and restarting explorer (which is in effect "crashing" it I believe) is probably not your wisest choice. However, I have found that occasionally (in 98) explorer just starts to "act up". At these times a nice reload of explorer is just the trick.

As far as the systray goes (and I am merely speculating), I dont believe you can restore the icons. The systray is reloaded with explorer, and the icons were "placed" there by their applications. However, these applications dont watch to make sure their systray icons are still there. Once they are lost, they are lost.

Try re-running such open applications. Some are written to recognize existing instances and may replace the systray icon (ICQ and WinAmp do this I believe). Or if you can, simply shutdown (or endtask) those applications and run them again. Many agents that were running there can be found in the StartUp folder of the StartMenu, or the startup keys in the registry (HCU|HLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run|RunOnce|RunServices|RunServicesOnce/).

- Two-Bits