Here’s an interesting problem that I just came across. One of my customer’s XP computers would boot normally, except the system tray was completely blank. No icons — just a blank bar where you wold normally see the system icons.

I checked to make sure the system tray hadn’t been move to the side or the top of the screen.

I eventually found this note on one of the forums that solved the problem.

Basically you press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to bring up the task manager. From that application you can run REGEDIT from the File > New Task (RUN) option.

Once in REGEDIT you delete the following keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects2
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StreamsMRU

Reboot and the system tray should be accessible. In my case the system tray was squished down to just a sliver. However, I was able to move the cursor over the sliver and resize it so it looked normal.

Weird, but it worked.