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How to detect parent .EXE from tray icon?

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rjbull:
I use Vista Home Premium, UAC On, user account.  Quite a lot of things are loaded into the tray at system startup.  However, Vista has a habit of missing some of them out every now and then, with occasional oddities like loading a service, but not the GUI that controls it, or loading an app correctly, but with a blanked-out icon.

This problem is known.  Various sites on the Internet suggest fixes that involve either re-starting Windows Explorer, which I don't think is a permanent fix, or, making a Registry hack, which I'd rather avoid.  So I decided I'd use one or other menuing program to mimic the Taskbar, but complete with everything the Taskbar should have.

I know where the .EXEs are for programs I installed myself, and where I had to go look, usually Chameleon Task Manager was a good helper.  But, some tray programs were pre-installed, like Volume, connection status, Bluetooth, etc.  Given that .EXE names can be enigmatic, how can I easily match a tray icon to its .EXE?  I'm envisaging hovering the mouse over an icon and having something pop up to tell me what I'm looking for.  That looks problematic as most icons offer tooltips when you hover over them.

Please, does anyone know an easy way to solve this?  Or have I overlooked something obvious?

Ath:
I'd try and find the cause of the apps/services not loading, before I'd find an alternative to the systemtray. Could my NANY2013 entry KeepUpApp be of help? It check to see if an app or service isn't running, and (re)starts it when needed.

app103:
Yes, the problem is well known and not just limited to Vista. It happens mostly with users that have a lot of stuff that loads at startup, with a lot of those apps having tray icons.

I used to keep a checklist with every app that stuck an icon in the tray and would go through the list, one by one, checking if the icon made it into the tray, killing and restarting apps that didn't ...after every reboot. It was ridiculous!

It was when I realized why this was happening that I could begin to solve the problem and not just deal with it after the fact.

At startup, everything is competing for system resources and trying to load itself, all at the same time. If the number of apps trying to load is high, there will be losers. All of them trying to get their icon in the tray means that some of them won't make it. The app will still be running in the background (which is why Ath's KeepUpApp probably won't help) but there just won't be a tray icon for you to be able to access the app from.

The simple solution is to not have all the apps trying to load at the same time. But manually clicking a bunch of shortcuts after Windows is done loading, is an inconvenient pain in the butt, which is why we have all this stuff loading at startup, in the first place.

So, I wrote an app to try to simulate the process of waiting, clicking shortcuts, and waiting some more.

Lacuna Launcher allows you to set up a list of paths to apps you want to run. If you configure a shortcut to Lacuna launcher with command line parameters, you can specify the length of time it should wait before it starts launching the stuff on the list. You can also specify the length of time it should wait between items. Use a stopwatch to time Windows startup (without the apps on the list) or play with those numbers till you find the right amount. Then if you clean out your startup folder and put that shortcut to Lacuna Launcher in there, it should solve your messed up/missing icons problem by staggering out the starting of those apps, so they are not all competing to get their icons into the tray at the same time.

You probably won't be able to put everything in the list, but the things you can put in there will reduce the load on Windows when it first starts up, enough to relieve the problem.

DerekHal:
Another startup manager is Startup Delayer:
http://www.r2.com.au/page/products/show/startdelay

More alternatives on this page:
http://alternativeto.net/software/startup-delayer/

anandcoral:
Hi rjbull,

I use Pitaschio http://pitaschio.ara3.net/

It has many options and and I use most of them. One of the option is to show a running program path etc. even if it is hidden i.e. in tray or not.

This you can use to see the corresponding exe name with full path.

Regards,

Anand

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