Notification Icons On Taskbar Disappears

I recently noticed on some of the office laptops that the notification taskbar icons were missing. It looked like there was something, but when I clicked on it nothing happened; it was an empty space. I restarted the machine and even restarted the explorer.exe service within the task manager and no luck. The only way to fix the issue was to do “hard reset” on the notification taskbar icons. Here are the steps:

Step 1: This is the issue that we are facing. Missing icons within the notification area. What’s the deal?

Step 2: Open up the run dialog box:
Step 3: Type in “regedit” and hit enter
Step 4: Once the registry editor is open you will navigate to the following path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

Step 5: Within the TrayNotify node you will see “IconStreams” & “PastIconsStream”. Backed them up and delete them!

Step 6: Open the Windows Task Manager and click on the Processes tab and locate the “explorer.exe” process

Step 7: Once you locate the “explorer.exe” process. Right-click on it and “End Process”
Step 8: Click on “End process” to confirm it
Step 9: You will noticed that the taskbar disappeared. Don’t worry this is normal when you do this to the explorer.exe process:
Step 10: Now within Windows Task Manager click on “File” and choose “New Task (Run….)”

Step 11: You will type in the explorer.exe and click on “ok”
Step 12: If everything goes well. You will notice that the taskbar is back and no more empty notification blank icons. Congrats!