lost sys tray icons

[ajmmac]

every time i have to force closure of a program not responding using ctrl-alt-del/end task i lose all but my clock and volume control icons in the system tray--only way i can get them back is by restarting--i am running w98se--any ideas anybody?

[moonacre]

Using ctrl-alt-del/end task should be a matter of last resort. Windows is a "highly integrated" OS and so ending a program in this way will always leave interupted/broken processes and dlls in memory. You can't avoid the sort of effects you are seeing. Find out what is wrong with your system and why you need to close programs in this way then you can fix the source of your problem not the symptoms.

[ajmmac]

thanks for ur answer moonacre--there seems to be no pattern to these program freezes--and it is not all that often but when it does happen neither normal closure nor alt-f4 works either--i'm thinking of re-installing win 98 to try and cure it--ajmmac

[moonacre]

If you can't detect a pattern then it's pot luck whether you'll find the cause. Reinstalling is probably your best bet but before you do that, assuming you've done the obvious like running scandisk etc, you should run the W98 system file checker to make sure you've not got a corrupted system file. By the way the symptoms you describe could possibly be memory related - either a faulty memory module or windows memory management. You can download various memory test utilities and for memory management I'd recommend Cacheman (also free). Might be worth a try.