Process explorer systray / taskbar / tray icons lost on explorer.exe (shell) restart

Question

If you use the process explorer graphs in your systray when explorer restarts all systray icons for process explorer are lost.

Has been this way for quite awhile (probably ever? at least years?). It is a bit annoying as you must also kill the old one off after starting the new one (as no other way to bring it to the front if one instance is not enabled and it minimizes to systray).

Windows 10 and Windows 11 effected. Does not matter if running as administrator or normal user.

To repro:

Download windows 11 dev env: Download windows 11 dev env: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/

Start it up

Download: https://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe

Run procexp.exe

Configure one or more systray icons (under options but cpu one should be by default)

kill explorer.exe

run explorer.exe

icons for process explorer are gone.

I would say 95% of the systray icons comeback but a few apps this happens to, process explorer is just one of the more annoying ones when it does.

May be related to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1282923/process-explorer-v17-04-bug-report in that if process explorer started too early and never-readds the icons to the systray this happens. Shell does start fast though so not sure.

Answer 1

Yes changing the icon configuration in process explorer or restarting it fixes it but this is an annoyance (especially as you can't bring PE forward without the icon if its hiding).

@Stephen Gragert this is not new. Now maybe your explorer started restarted more recently showing you the issue, but now I am quite confident this has always existed as a bug in process explorer.

I went ahead and wrote up the fix in this ticket: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/issues/3051

Of note that ticket is about Explorer Patcher essentially fixing this for misbehaving apps. I put an example in there of an app fixing it is what is needed by PE by Microsoft/Mark. Sadly PE is closed source so we can't make a PR for it ourselves and not sure how much attention it gets still.

Answer 2

If I'm understanding you correctly, we have been experiencing the same issue.

What works for me: after PC boots up (PE is set to run automatically at startup), PE should be running but I often don't see tray icons, launch PE manually, go to Options, then Tray Icons, uncheck any icon, they all appear now, then go back into Tray Icons and check the icon that was unchecked in the previous step.

All your selected icons should now appear in the tray. It's not a permanent fix but it's the fastest fix that I've found. Now I have a 50% chance the icons will appear as desired on the next boot up.

Hope that helps.