[help] tray icons disappearing

[DeadDude]

first time posting in here, so I hope I got the tag idea right.... sorry if I didn't!

I got Windows XP Media Center installed on an E1705 Dell laptop...

AFAIK, it is fully updated and patched... but for some reason late last night, while using VMWare (does that matter? I dunno), a whole mess of the icons next to my clock disappeared. Among them, the 4-6 icons with meters and speed controls...

What I mean, is I got 2 programs that do the whole "hardware sensor" thing and fan controls, and dynamic CPU speed switching...

The programs did *not* close, if I try to run them again they error out "Another process is already running"

If I use CAD, and manually close those programs, I *can* reopen them. But their icons disappear again.

This is really bugging me, as without access to the controls I sometimes get locked out of the fan controls to cool my laptop... and I've been 'locked' into ?!300Mhz?! from time to time.

As I said, the only thing done last night was installing VMWare, creating a pc for an experimental OS, tinking with that OS... VMWare prompted to disabled auto-play, I said yeah...

ANd my DVD drive started getting smacked every minute or so... You know, it tried to spin up for a disk, didn't see one, so it stopped... minute later, repeat... (like the old 95 would to simulate the auto-insert notification) I think this was a bug of the OS I was trying in the VM, but it didn't stop when I exited the VM. SO I just shut down for the night, and noticed just before I clicked "shutdown", that those icons were missing from the clock area....

And now today, the same thing happened.... all I have opened/used was a networked printer, and firefox (+Adobe PDF reader)...

any ideas??

I don't think I have a virus, but if someone knows of one that does this particular thing, please inform! Oh yeah, I did a 'scandisk thorough' (the equivalent in XP with chkdsk) yesterday morning, before anything happened....

Edited January 17, 2007 by DeadDude

[cluberti]

The only reasons for taskbar icons to exit when still running would be that the explorer.exe process terminated and restarted itself - have you installed anything recently that would've had shell hooks for your DVD drive, or media files? If you run autoruns and shellexview to disable all non-Microsoft startup items, services, and shell extensions, and reboot, does the problem continue?