wifi icon missing from taskbar

Hello friends, am in need of small help but its important. Am having a HP laptop running with Vista Home Premium. There was no problem on the same since I bought the laptop, but today morning when I connected to a WiFi network, suddenly my Network Icon got disappeared. For getting it back I went to check Notification Area by right clicking the Task bar > Properties.

Here I found that the network square is grayed out and I just cannot select it. I even tried disconnecting and reconnecting wifi again but that too dint helped.

Somebody please tell me whats wrong with my notebook and how it can be fixed ?

There is way to show up system icons on your desktop or Taskbar through Local Group Policy Editor (GPedit.msc) but as you said the ICON was already there since month and disappeared just today morning, I don’t think you need to play with GPedit. There must be some another problem.

BTW, did you tried restarting the laptop ? if not do it now. Most of the problems gets fixed by just rebooting the system. That is why I like Microsoft. Let me know the results.

Thanks a lot for your help buddy. Though that ding fixed the problem but atleast I got an idea in form of a pop up message that told me to do System Restore. When I booted back ,I got a small pop saying something about system restore, I don’t remember the exact message.

I went for the same and found a restore point that was created 2 days ago without the latest update. Somewhere In my mind I think the problem could have been caused due to the Windows Updates yesterday. Hence i restored the system to a point 2 days ago and guess what, the problem got fixed.

Thanks BTW.

Here is one more simpler and easier solution:

• Ctrl+Shift+Esc (for XP and before, do Ctrl+Alt+Del)
• Go to processes
• Find explorer.exe
• End explorer.exe process.
• Do not close task manager.
• Click File-->New Task-->explorer.exe

It should work perfectly without a reboot.

Perfect. Restarting explorer.exe works.