Can you send a signal to Windows Explorer to make it refresh the systray icons?

Question

This problem has been afflicting me for quite a while and it\'s been really annoying.

Every time I login after a reboot/power cycle the explorer takes some time to s

Answer 1

@Skip R, and anyone else wanting to do this in C, with this code verified compiled in a recent (most recent) mingw on Windows 10 64 bit (but with the mingw 32 bit package installed), this seems to work in Windows XP / 2003 to get rid of stale notification area icons.

I installed mingw via Chocolatey, like this:

choco install mingw --x86 --force --params "/exception:sjlj"

(your mileage may vary on that, on my system, the compiler was then installed here:

C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\mingw\tools\install\mingw32\bin\gcc.exe

and then a simple

gcc refresh_notification_area.c

yielded an a.exe which solved a stale notification area icon problem I was having on Windows 2003 (32 bit).

The code, adapted from @Stephen Klancher above is (note this may only work on Windows XP/2003, which fulfilled my purposes):

#include 

#define FW(x,y) FindWindowEx(x, NULL, y, "")

int main ()
{

    HWND hNotificationArea;
    RECT r;

    //WinXP
    // technique found at:
    // https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74723/can-you-send-a-signal-to-windows-explorer-to-make-it-refresh-the-systray-icons#18038441
    GetClientRect(
        hNotificationArea = FindWindowEx(
            FW(FW(FW(NULL, "Shell_TrayWnd"), "TrayNotifyWnd"), "SysPager"),
            NULL,
            "ToolbarWindow32",
            "Notification Area"),
        &r);

    for (LONG x = 0; x < r.right; x += 5)
        for (LONG y = 0; y < r.bottom; y += 5)
            SendMessage(
                hNotificationArea,
                WM_MOUSEMOVE,
                0,
                (y << 16) + x);

  return 0;

}