Avast 5 - Missing tray icon on Windows startup

[VanguardLH]

Avast 5.0.462
Windows XP Pro SP-3

The settings in Avast 5 are configured to show its tray icon.  If I manually load the UI program (avastui.exe) then the setting is obeyed and the tray icon appears.  The tray icon remains until I shutdown or reboot Windows.  On the next restart of Windows, the tray icon is missing again.  Sorry, but I'm not manually starting the UI just to kick Avast's butt to make it realize that it didn't obey its own settings and suddenly make the tray icon appear.

If Avast is so witless that it cannot comply with its own settings, I have to wonder what else Avast doesn't obey in its settings or expected behaviors.

[Rednose]

Hi VanguardLH

This is no Avast! problem, but a known Windows XP problem :

http://winhlp.com/node/16

I hope it will help you

Greetz, Red.

[VanguardLH]

Oh really.  I already know about the status update problem with tray icons that only attempt to display once the state of their tray icon and thereafter never update its status (to update its display) ever again.  In fact, if you use Task Manager to kill the explore.exe process (the desktop UI) and then its File -> New Task menu, you'll find out which tray icons don't bother to update their status.  That's not the problem here.

Avast managed to keep displaying its tray icon all through the various minor versions of 4.x.  Avast 5 managed to keep displaying its tray icon until this last build.  An uninstall and reinstall of Avast 5.0.462 makes it start complying with its setting and displays its tray icon after a reboot.  So something gets hosed in Avast 5's behavior that it does not enforce the display of its tray icon on Windows startup.  A tray icon isn't going to appear if the program doesn't itself put one there.

A reinstall of Avast 5.0.462 got it to comply with the setting to show a tray icon ... for now.  If it broke now, it'll probably break again later unless Alwil takes some deliberate effort to determine why their program won't actually create a tray icon when it loads its service.  Yeah, once you load its UI (avastui.exe) then the tray icon appears but the point is to have the tray icon WITHOUT manual intervention by the user. 

There is a load of avastui.exe in a registry Run key with the /nogui option to get the tray icon to appear in the first place.  It simply wasn't being obeyed.  I did an uninstall of Avast5, used Zsoft's Uninstaller (used to record installations) to do some more cleanup, and then did a manual cleanup of remnant files and registry entries.  A subsequent install of Avast5 (same version as I already had) added the "<path>\avastui.exe /nogui" Run key in the registry which is to add the tray icon.  It works now after the reinstall and a reboot of Windows but I can't say for how long (I only did 2 reboots to check the tray icon still appeared).  Having to reinstall a product is a poor workaround for bad code.