Restore Missing Volume or Network Icons in the Windows System Tray

While Windows has come along way since the days of Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 it’s not completely impervious to strange errors and problems. Once such issue under Windows Vista and Windows 7 is when the volume or network activity icons disappear from the system tray or are replaced with blank spaces.

Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to fix this problem by clearing the icon cache:

  1. Open Task Manager by hitting CTRL+Shift+Esc,
  2. Go to the “Processes” tab,
  3. Click on the “explorer.exe” process and click the “End Process” button,
  4. Repeat for other instances of “explorer.exe”,
  5. In Task Manager, click on “File” up the top then “New Task (Run…)”,
  6. In the white box, type in “cmd.exe” and press Enter,
  7. At the command line window, type in the following lines pressing Enter at the end of each:
CD /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
DEL IconCache.db /a
explorer.exe
EXIT
Hopefully, your volume and/or network activity icons should be restored but if not then reboot your computer and things should be back to normal.

3 comments

    • Rene on December 9, 2011 at 07:15
    • Reply

    That fix work fine on my Vista64 Home Premium.

    Great to have fond your site.

    Tks

    1. Glad to hear it fixed your problem! 🙂

    • manue on June 11, 2014 at 19:04
    • Reply

    Tried but didnt do a thing. Thanks,

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