Tray Icons don't appear--why? Win2K Pro

[Egon's Dragon]

Win2K Pro: This is strange, so I thought I'd see if anyone can help. It's not serious, but: I used to have Norton Anti-Virus 2002. In the program, I selected "show tray icons" or whatever. It would appear once, then every time I booted up, no icon. I knew the program was running from the Task Manager. I have since un-installed Norton and installed Avast!. Same phenomenon. Tray icons the first few times I booted up, now nothing. The settings in Avast! are the same: "show tray icons" but they don't appear when Windows boots up. Strange. Why is this happening? I just want to be sure that my anti-virus program is running fine.

Windows 2000 Professional, Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop, Celeron, 298 MB RAM.