Windows 10: Cannot locate printer or device manager icons in system tray options

I need to run a cleaning process on my printer. But all the manual says is to access that task via the printer icon in the Windows system tray. Cannot locate printer or device manager icons in system tray options. Have tried every conceivable way but just cant find.

:)

 

Devices and Printers Icons missing following update to Windows 10


I'm posting this in case it helps others encountering the same problem. I spent three or four days on this without success. Google searches on this forum and generally on the web and Microsoft came up with no working solution - although it appears to be a problem that has afflicted Windows 7 and Windows 8 users too. I finally solved the problem by comparing the services list of the PC with the problem to that of a PC that did not have the problem.

I updated three Windows 8.1 PCs to Windows 10. All updates went fine but one PC had an annoying problem that (finally) I have now solved. This was a brand new Lenovo PC out of the box with Windows 8.1 pre-installed. My first step was to run the free upgrade to Windows 10. This appeared to work fine with one (at least so far) problem - all the following are related:

1. In Printers and Devices (in the control panel) no icons for printers appeared after I installed them. The default printers like fax or PDF printer (pre-installed) did appear but a directly connected printer, a wireless printer and network printers did not appear after they were installed following the Windows 10 upgrade. However the printers did appear in Device Manager and in the print menus for programs (e.g. MS Word). And printing worked as normal. Uninstalling and reinstalling printers did not work. Nor did changing drivers (through Windows). These were all Windows 10 "approved" drivers in any case (and Windows would tell me the best driver was already installed).
2. Trying to uninstall one of the printers that did appear (by right-click on the icon) would not work. The printer and the icon were unchanged. (I tried this because one forum thread I found suggested that a particular PDF printer driver "broke" Devices & Printers. Nonsense.)
3. After a couple of days I spotted that the safely eject USB stick icon did not work properly. When a USB stick was inserted the safely eject icon would appear in the tray but either the device did not show or it was greyed out. The only way to eject was to use the right-click context menu from Windows explorer for the USB drive letter.

Solution
The problem turned out to be a Device service not running.

• Right-click on "This PC" and pick "Manage" to open Computer Management. (I am using Classic Shell for a start menu so how you get to Computer Management may be different - you could try search from the start menu to get a link to open the console).
• Open "Services" (under Services and Applications). In the main window of services scroll down until...
• You should find five "Device" services: "Device Association Service", "Device Install Service", "Device Management Enrollment Service", "Device Setup Manager" and "DevQuery Background Discovery Broker". The first, third, fourth and fifth should have a startup type of "Manual (Trigger Start)". "Device Management Enrollment Service" is just "Manual".
• On the problem machine the "Device Install Service" was shown as disabled. I set this to "Manual (Trigger Start)" (from the properties). (I have been typing so long now that I forget whether it was this or one of the others that was disabled - pretty certain it was this. In any case enable manual start for all of them and make sure none are disabled.)
• After checking and (if necessary) changing the service startups, reboot the machine.

Now check the Devices and Printers folder: all the missing printer icons should appear. I found that there were other things missing too that now appeared - e.g. a network NAS drive appeared that I had not realised was missing.

Plug in a USB stick. You should find that now the eject device safely icon appears correctly in the system tray with the USB device and drive letter and clicking eject works as it should.

I hope this helps anyone else who experiences the same frustrating bug.

 

How to recover hidden icon in System tray on Windows 10?

Hi Callum,

As you are facing issues with un-hiding the icon in System tray, we will help you with this issue.

Do let us know which is the icon you have deleted from the system tray for better assistance?

I suggest you to try the below steps to add the icons to Taskbar and check if it helps.

• Press Windows key, click on Settings.
• Click on System> Notifications & actions.
• Click on Select which icons appear on taskbar (to select the icons that appear on Taskbar)
  and also click on Turn system icons on or off

Hope it helps. If the issue still persists, let us know with brief description for further assistance. We will be happy to help you.

Thank you.

 

USB Drives plugged in but No Safely Remove Icon in Tray, and

....no drives listed in Hardware List.

When I plug USB drives in, the Safely Remove Hardware icon does not appear in in system tray (its not hidden either)

First, I went to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Select which Icons Appear on the Taskbar...





.. and found it was already on

Next I tried using the solution in this post...

Solved No safely remove icon in tray any more after Windows 10 Anniversary up - Windows 10 Forums

...making a shortcut from "rundll32 shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll", but when I run the shortcut, there are no devices listed...





(in this screenshot, you can see two USB drives in the Explorer window in the BG but nothing listed in the panel. )

NOTE: They are listed in Disk Management and in the Device Manager under Disk Drives, and they function just fine..
I think the Safely Remove Hardware icon is not appearing because despite being detected and showing in Explorer, Device Manager and Disk Management, its not being listed in this panel for some reason.


NOTE2: I recently installed a new motherboard.

ASUS B150M-A
CPU Intel Core i5 - 6500 (3.2 GHz)
Mem 4096 MB (DDR4 - 2133)

I am 100% sure it was working before that, but I cannot say for sure if it was still working after that.
A friend suggested that it might be a setting in BIOS, but I have looked through it and nothing stands out.

Any suggestions would be welcome.


ETA: this is not the system listed in my System Specs page. That is another computer which I still have.