Windows 10: Mouse over tray icons causes explorer restart

Windows 10, upgraded from 7, the problem existed on 7 also.


I can safely put my mouse over the ^ that opens the panel of hidden icons and can interact with them normally, but letting the mouse over any icon to the right of that and to the left of the language selector may cause explorer to immediately restart.


It never happens immediately after a reboot, the longer Windows has been up the more likely it is to happen, once it happens once it's certain to happen again until the next reboot.


Any ideas on what's going on?

:)

 

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.

 

Uninstalled program, but system tray icon is still there...

@Steve C - that would be valid if it were only the tray icon, but the first post mentioned

- hence my suggestion.

 

Notification Tray App Icons Disappear

Hello Jenith,

Rather than creating a new local user account I've tested with the local administrator account. I logged on with the local administrator and created a new user profile. This unfortunately has the exact same issue.

I've been doing some additional troubleshooting and have determined that the issue occurs when the explorer.exe process is refreshing the desktop. It is easy to reproduce:

1. Open task manager.

2. On the users tab expand the list of processes for the current user.

3. Right click on the "Windows Explorer" process and select Restart.

Once you restart the "Windows Explorer" process the desktop will refresh and some of the notification tray icons will disappear. This appears to happen periodically while using the computer. I'm not saying that windows automatically restarts the process
-- rather the outcome is identical where the SAME notification tray icons disappear. The system icons always return along with Outlook 2013. It appears that the explorer process refreshes the desktop periodically and that causes my icons to disappear.

Some additional things I've tried:

- Removing several group policies that I thought MAY cause this.

- Removing the workstation from the domain.

- Creating a new local user profile.

- Creating a new domain user profile.