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ESET icon in the notification area has gone !


EzheTThezh

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Hello,

 

I installed ESET NOD 32 Anti virus about 4 weeks ago on my Win7 x64 Pro machine. It ran perfectly fine until today: the icon in the notification area has suddenly gone away. I know that ESET is still running because I can see both egui.exe and ekrn.exe processes running in the task manager, but it is quite annoying and unusual.

In fact, it is not the first time it happens: on the first time I had to backup my PC using an Acronis system image in order to have my ESET icon back again. And I didn't do 2 .net Framework updates mentioned by Windows Update because they seemed to be the culprits. And it worked fine for a couple of days. But now, the problem is back again: the ESET icon in the notification area has gone away again although I didn't do the 2 Framework Windows Updates ...

 

Thank you in advance for helping me,

 

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I've been intermittently having this issue with other applications' icons but couldn't figure out the cause.

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As far as i know, ESET wasn't built on the .net framework nor does it require it to operate.

As Marcos states a few other icons have experienced this as well, and i have also seen this on a few of my machines. ;)

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Hello,

 

Navigate to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Notification Area Icons

Choose ESET Main GUI , select behavior of "hide icon and notifications" , Click OK, then re-enter the setting "show icon and notifications", click OK again

See if this helps as a temporary workaround for the time being. :wacko:

 

I can only suggest attempting to reinstall to see if it comes back if not.

Export all your settings if you need to, so its a smooth reinstall.

Try running "sfc /scannow" from an elevated command prompt, just to be safe and sure.

 

I have not experienced this on my home/personal computer just yet, only office and client computers brought to me.

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Thank you Arakasi,

My problem seems to be fixed for now: ESET's notification area icon is back. It is strange because I didn't change anything in any settings ...

I cross the fingers.

Thank you again, I will follow your advice if the problem is occuring again and will post here again  :)

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I am currently having the same missing tray icon on one of my systems (Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit fully updated).  In my case when this happens, egui.exe is running (started from the registry, with arguments "/hide /waitservice" according to SysInternals Process Explorer), but the icon is not showing.  The Notification Area Icons settings are correctly set to show the icon.

As a Windows developer of a company internal program which runs on thousands of Windows computers and uses a tray icon, I learned over the years that the Windows function which creates the tray icon (Shell_NotifyIcon()) may fail during Windows startup, and the failure is apparently due to the amount of startup activity going on at the time.  To ensure that I can almost always create my tray icon I check the return code from that function, and on failure wait three seconds and try again, up to five retries.  Since modifying my code in that manner I have had no further reports of my tray icon not showing.

Perhaps is the ESET developers are not using such a technique they could modify their code in a similar manner.  It's the sort of change that can't hurt anything regardless of whether that is the real problem.

Larry

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Hi LarryF

So as I thought it seems to be a Windows issue. It is comforting to know that ESET is still running fine and is still keeping my machine safe even if its tray icon is not showing up everytime.

I hope ESET team will hear what you said here and try to implement the code in their future version.

Thank you very much for your feedback LarryF.

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As a Windows developer of a company internal program which runs on thousands of Windows computers and uses a tray icon, I learned over the years that the Windows function which creates the tray icon (Shell_NotifyIcon()) may fail during Windows startup, and the failure is apparently due to the amount of startup activity going on at the time.  To ensure that I can almost always create my tray icon I check the return code from that function, and on failure wait three seconds and try again, up to five retries.  Since modifying my code in that manner I have had no further reports of my tray icon not showing.

 

This is what we are doing - in regular time intervals we check if the icon is created, otherwise the mentioned function is called. It's also called under other circumstances, such as when a bubble notification is about to be displayed.

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This is what we are doing - in regular time intervals we check if the icon is created, otherwise the mentioned function is called. It's also called under other circumstances, such as when a bubble notification is about to be displayed.

 

 

Just for completeness, my NOD32 tray icon is now showing, after a reboot.

 

 

But apparently, when egui.exe is running (hidden) and the tray icon is not showing, something is not working correctly in the code that periodically tries to detect if it is there and to create it if it is not.  Since this happens fairly infrequently, I guess no one at ESET has ever seen it happen.  The next time I see it happen, I'll try using SysInternals Process Monitor to see if I see anything interesting.  I could also try attaching a debugger to the process, but lacking any symbols I doubt that would give me anything useful.

 

 

Larry

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There is always the options of submitting a bug or issue to ESET

 

I think ESET is aware of the issue, as Marcos has posted in this thread.

 

I have also had the missing tray icon once since I last posted in this thread, but did not discover the following until I had rebooted the next day and the tray icon was back.

 

I think I have found a way to get the tray icon back when it is missing.  Egui.exe resists being killed from Task Manager or Process Explorer (access denied), but you can end the running instance that is supposed to provide the tray icon (at least when running Windows 7) by opening a command prompt window and entering "taskkill -im egui.exe" (without the quotes) and then responding Yes to the prompt "Are you sure you want to quit ESET NOD32 Antivirus?".  Now if you restart egui.exe from the Start menu (Start, All Programs, ESET, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, ESET NOD32 Antivirus), the tray icon is created.

 

Larry

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While I'm not sure there's anything definitive as to what is causing the hidden system tray or notifications icons area issue, I would view this a serious.

A clean reinstallation may be in order. Note that all of your customizations would be lost in the process.

Read other caveats in the contained ESET KB Article should you choose to go forward.



 

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Thank you all for answers.

I sent a message to ESEST support: they answered me to reinstall the product but it was not necessary because first I ran WiseRegistryCleaner, it found about 100 problems, I fixed them, I rebooted my machine and my tray ESET icon is here now  :)

Quite weird although ...

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I think I have found a way to get the tray icon back when it is missing.  Egui.exe resists being killed from Task Manager or Process Explorer (access denied), but you can end the running instance that is supposed to provide the tray icon (at least when running Windows 7) by opening a command prompt window and entering "taskkill -im egui.exe" (without the quotes) and then responding Yes to the prompt "Are you sure you want to quit ESET NOD32 Antivirus?".  Now if you restart egui.exe from the Start menu (Start, All Programs, ESET, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, ESET NOD32 Antivirus), the tray icon is created.

I had another instance of the tray icon not showing, and the procedure in the quote of my previous post above worked just fine to get the icon back.

 

And just to be clear, the problem that I am seeing is not related to the issues covered in the ESET FAQs or KB article.

 

Larry

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  • 1 year later...

This has been an ongoing issue for years now & ESET does not seem to bother about it. I switched to BitDefender but I'd like to come back & ready to pay (because I like the Eset firewall better) if they fix the problem. I installed a trial about 10 days ago; worked ok but indeed reboots cause the icon to appear yes or no

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This thread was nearly a year old. So if you're really still experiencing this issue then I would had reported this earlier.

 

I installed a trial about 10 days ago; worked ok but indeed reboots cause the icon to appear yes or no

So what? Yes or no? Is it working or not? You have to tell me that - my crystal ball actually has some issues... :)

 

So just in case it's not working, check if you're using the latest version and follow this guide.

Recently we didn't had any issues with disappearing tray icons AFAIK.

Edited by rugk
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After a reboot the icon is missing every time. It turns out that egui.exe runs from the wrong registry key.

 

The proposed solution in hxxp://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN532 does not work; registry editor refuses to create a string value "egui" because obviously it already exists (and cannot be deleted/renamed) in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run whereas it should be located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run 

 

Any suggestions on how to create that registry entry ?

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If the entry already exists then that's all right. Windows loads programs from both registry keys so no one is wrong.

If you boot and the icon is not shown you can also check in the task manager whether egui.exe is running and tell us the result.

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egui.exe is running but the icon does not show. I don't understand why Eset say in their KB article that on 64 bit systems it needs to run from the wow6432node if it does not make a difference ?

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egui.exe is running but the icon does not show. I don't understand why Eset say in their KB article that on 64 bit systems it needs to run from the wow6432node if it does not make a difference ?

 

I'll contact the guy who wrote the KB article for clarification. The thing is egui.exe is 64-bit and thus it makes no sense to run it from Wow6432Node.

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So and if you close and restart egui.exe (like this - although you don't necessary need to restart it with admin rights) it's still not shown?

And does it still shows the splash screen?

Edited by rugk
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