Clear System Tray Cache In Windows, Fix Corrupted Tray Icons

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You can call me a perfectionist or may be I am just plain crazy but there is nothing more annoying than seeing a Windows system tray full of empty icons. Although I don’t know exactly why this happens but over the course of your computer use, somehow your system tray cache can get corrupted. In this article, I will give you some tips on how to clear system tray cache in Windows machines.  Now there are a few ways to do this, one of them include manually editing the registry. I have a way out of this issue for those of you who don’t want to mess with registry settings as well.

Fix corrupted Windows system tray icons – Registry method

Here is the registry editor method on how to clear system tray cache in Windows. From your Windows account, open the registry editor by going to Start Menu > Run > and then typing “regedit”. Navigate to the following key.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

Now you should delete the following keys under “TrayNotify” these keys are IconStreams & PastIconsStream. If you are having trouble opening “regedit” then you may not have the proper account permissions set. If you are in a domain environment, be sure to login to your local administrator or domain administrator account.

Once the above step is complete, press CTRL + ALT + DEL  and go to task manager. Under processes, right click on Explorer.exe and end task.  While doing this, Windows should do a system tray refresh  and all your icons should load back up perfectly.

Fix corrupted Windows system tray icons –  Simple method using a script!

There is also a simple method to do the above steps through a script which also accomplishes our goal. If you want to keep things simple and just want to do this quickly, you can download the following script file here Clean System Tray .BAT and run it on your computer. The script should automatically delete the “IconStreams” & “PastIconsStream” files and automatically exit Windows Explorer.exe for you.

Once this is done, your Windows 8 or Windows 7 system tray cache should be reset and a new icon cache will be rebuilt from scratch. This will also get rid of those annoying empty icon spaces in your system tray.

Clear system tray cache in Windows using CCleaner

Another easy way to clear system tray cache in Windows 8 & Window 7 is through CCleaner. It is also one of the most useful tools to have on the computer. It can do so much more than system tray cache cleaning; it can repair your registry, clean DNS cache, font cache, auto complete history, cookies, history etc. It can even be used as a program uninstaller for your Microsoft Windows operating system. Here is how to clean up your system tray cache using CCleaner. Simply, choose the cleaner tab then scroll down to advanced and select “Tray Notifications Cache” and run the cleaner. Once this is done, be sure to restart your computer.

I hope this was informative & it helped you out in someway with your Microsoft Windows troubles. Please be sure to leave your comments below for this article. Thank you for visiting.