I'm just kidding about the hax part. If you look under your name on each of these forum posts, there are small icons. The on furthest to the right looks like a flip calandar w/ the number "12" on it. If you mouse over it, it says "365 Days Registered". I was joking/poking fun at the fact that you have a little badge that says you've been registered for a year or more, yet it says your "Join Date" is January 2009.
On a further update to this issue I'm having I've tried the process below.
1. Back up the Registry by creating a restore point.
2. Go to Start > Run (or Windows-key + R), type in regedit and hit OK.
3. Navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cla sses\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Wi ndows\CurrentVersion \TrayNotify.
4. Delete the values IconStreams and PastIconsStream.
5. Open up the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), go to the Processes tab, select explorer.exe and click End Process.
6. Open the Applications tab and click New Task at the bottom-right of the window.
7. In the message box that pops up type in explorer.exe and hit OK.
8. Explorer.exe will reload, and the missing icons should now be back in the system-tray where they belong.
9. Then if the volume bar isnt there, go to taskbar properties (where the volume was gray) and simply tick the box.
I found this on
this post.
I'm letting it sit to see if this fixes the problem(The icons tend to disappear after a few minutes). I already have one icon that's disappeared, but it's an app that's had a lot of compatibility issues and I don't think has ever worked correctly in the tray. It's a standalone exe that's a .net framework app and it crashes for lots of different reasons, so I don't think it's experiencing these symptoms for the same reason.
Although the thought just crossed my mind that it might be what's triggering this to begin with. If the above solution doesn't work, then I'll try closing that app for a while and see if that resolves it.