#notification area

A new Windows 7 machine was having trouble with the notification area icons not displaying. A blank area would show for each icon, and it would highlight itself when the mouse went over it, but there was no behavior when clicking.

Here's a rundown for a quick fix I found here:

Back up the Registry by creating a restore point.

Go to Start > Run (or Windows-key + R), type in regedit and hit OK. 

Navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

Delete the values IconStreams and PastIconsStream. 

Open up the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), go to the Processes tab, select explorer.exe and click End Process. 

Open the Applications tab and click New Task at the bottom-right of the window. 

In the message box that pops up type in explorer.exe and hit OK. 

Explorer.exe will reload, and the missing icons should now be back in the system-tray where they belong. 

Then if the volume bar isn't there, go to taskbar properties (where the volume was gray) and simply tick the box.