The Problem:

Sometimes if either the desktop crashes or windows decides to go wrong for whatever reason, it re-creates the system tray. There is no way to detect when that happens and your icon is now missing but your system tray application is still running.

The Solution:

Windows does send a windows message to be notified when the system tray is being created.  It won’t be sent to you unless you register to receive it.

To register to receive the message do the following and store the ID that is returned. The simplest way to do this is to store it in a global variable.

const int uTaskbarCreatedMsg = RegisterWindowMessageA("TaskbarCreated");

Then later on in your windows message loop handle the message.

LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND w, UINT msg, WPARAM wparam, LPARAM lparam)
{
    // ... handle other messages
    if (msg == uTaskbarCreatedMsg) {
        // Destroy any existing icon and recreate it
        CreateSystemTrayIcon();
        return 0;
    }
    // ... default message handling
}

Related Links

• System Tray SDK
• MSDN RegisterWindowMessage API

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