re: icons missing from system tray
Friday, February 17, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by meh
(1 messages posted)
Hello,
I think I may have a solution that may or may not be universal for this particular
dilemma.
Firstly, I too suffered from the same agonizing pain that stems from a mysterious
sporadic disappearance of the precious volume icon from the notification area.
I was going absolutely insane trying to figure out what was wrong because it did
not make any sense. So I sifted through each and every fix posted on this site and
still absolutely nothing. However, I can finally see the pretty little speaker sitting
quite comfortably at the bottom right corner of my screen and this is the story of
my struggle and triumph over the annoyance.
I'm typing away some assembly code at a virtual dos prompt using an assembler that
is not compatible at all with the nt virtual dos environment. After linking files,
windows kept reporting an error with ntvdm.exe. This, I discovered is used to setup
the virtual dos environment. Anyway, it seemed innocent so I figured everything was
fine. I just closed the prompt and opened it up again to continue. After a few compilation
and linking operations, the linker started reporting strange errors. "Fatal error:
Out of memory." The error became more interesting when I restared the machine and
sometimes it compiled while at other times it still reported the error. Still. Volume
icon was there. Everything seemed fine.
Now, prior--and completely separate--to this I was having some disturbance in the
video/audio realm of things. In particular, videos in the new XviD codec were not
playing. After installing GSpot and putting two and two together, the problem was
rooted in the audio codec (tag 55). If I disabled sound completely in bios, videos
with that particular codec, played fine. Proof that it was specifically the audio
is still not concrete though since the player could be blamed for the matter at hand.
So I installed VLC to use in place of Windows Media Player and to my surprise, the
video played with sound! Aha! I thought. Windows Media Player is the culprit, that
is, until I consulted the video information in VLC. The audio was being played at
32 kHz instead of the intended 48 kHz.
Additionally, the codec it was using was not at all the one GSpot reported was needed.
I then ventured into control panel and under the "Sounds and Audio devices" panel
looked at the various codecs on my system. The audio codec reported by GSpot as missing
was indeed present but for whatever reason, Windows Media Player and VLC alike, were
not utilizing it to decode the audio. Strange, I thought, but with my eyelids becoming
heavier, I uninstalled VLC, turned off the computer and went to bed. The following
day I pressed the power button the same I do every other time. It booted up like
it does everytime and I clicked on Windows Media Player to play some mp3s. The amplitude
of the music, seeming too high, needed to be lowered I thought and so I reached for
the bottom righ...
It was gone.
I described these earlier events to lay the groundwork for two particular interactions
that may have caused the problem to occur in the first place. It was either the compilation
of ".com" programs, which have access to even system areas in ram or the uninstallation
of VLC, which may have taken some system settings out with itself. The union of these
two facts results in the underlying truth that it was indeed a system problem. When
I first went into control panel and the "Sounds and Audio devices" panel, the list
of audio and video codecs was blanked in it's entirety. Also, after selecting a midi
synthesizer device, applying the settings and pressing, the drop-down box for the
synthesizer device kept going back to being blank.Very odd, especially considering
I had taken no action to produce this result. Well, I had to have done something.
Perhaps it wasn't a "conscious" effort. It only became stranger when the media files
that played fine before were still playing with WMP. Exhaustive research and trial
of every possible solution led me to this article.
Interesting, I thought. Maybe the audio driver is corrupted or the registry entries
related to it and communication between the driver and systray is broken. It made
perfect sense then to uninstall and reinstall the sound drivers. What made no sense
is that it still didn't work. Perhaps a corrupted systray.exe then. Replacing this
did not however, do the trick. So I went back to the control panel and stared at
the blank list seeking some sort of peace from the vast white rectangle in front
of my eyes. Finding nothing but turmoil and uneasiness over what seemed like the
ultimate bug, unfixable, doomed for failure! Desperate thinking led me to conclude
that it HAD to be directly related to the fact that all my audio and video codecs
somehow disappeared mysteriously and the only way to get the default ones was to
reinstall windows. And thus, this is exactly what I did. I first uninstalled the
drivers for sound. Then I deleted the backup drivers from \System32\Reinstall
Backups. To do that though, I had to remove it from the registry. While in the registry,
I removed all entries related to the sound drivers by searching for the Hardware
IDs and Class IDs that each entry related to. This is a fairly involved process as
you could cripple windows quite easily but even I was only experimenting and to a
certain extent was lucky that I didn’t ruin things beyond repair. If you have no
clue what you’re doing, then you are going to need someone to help you or you can
read a bit about the windows registry. There is a plethora of resources available
on the internet. Once most traces of the existence of an audio driver were removed,
I restarted windows and disabled the onboard audio from bios. This was done to prevent
windows from nagging me that it had found a new audio device and attempting to install
the driver for it. If you have a PCI card, then just turn off the computer and remove
it from the motherboard. I even uninstalled all of Windows Media Player from Add/Remove
Windows Components. Once I checked that windows detected no existence of any sound
device from “Sounds and Audio devices” in Control Panel and dxdiag.exe (if you have
DirectX installed), I proceeded to reinstall Windows overtop the existing installation.
The installation went smoothly and after booting up, low and behold all the missing
codecs were back. This was indeed a good sign. After inserting the CD that contained
my audio drivers, I installed them and went to “Sounds and Audio devices”. With my
breath held and my face turning blue, I checked on the option to place the volume
control in the taskbar and pressed apply. My eyes opened and loud gasp preceded a
louder scream of frustration. The icon did not show up. Not giving up hope I restarted
the computer. Sacre bleu! There it was! And still is! The volume icon came back!
It probably didn’t show up at first due to drivers not taking effect without Windows
being restarted. Ahhh…What a pretty site, I thought to myself as I reclined in my
chair and breathed a sigh of relief. I thanked God, had a good laugh and just turned
off the computer for a day or two. Needless to say, I won’t be testing my crummy
assembly language skills on a windows machine, at least not yet. And VLC seems too
risky so it shall stay untouched.
On a final note, I’d like to add that even the XviD files, the ones that use mp3
audio decoder (tag 55), are working now as well. Of course, this only added to my
amusement, which thereafter became joy.
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All messages in this thread [show all]
 |  | | | | | |  | .... (mike: Tue, Nov 14, 2006, 9:11 pm) |
| | | |  | Solution (Christopher Burton: Tue, Jan 24, 2006, 6:03 pm) |
| | re: icons missing from system tray (meh: Fri, Feb 17, 2006, 7:52 pm) |
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