First post, by Cloudschatze
- Rank
- Oldbie
I recently built a Windows 95 "gaming" system, and then ended-up having to upgrade to Windows 98SE to gain use of a USB-connected peripheral. One irritating "feature" of the upgrade is that, after the system boots into windows, I get a "working-in-background" mouse cursor for 3-5 seconds, after everything else has finished loading. I really should just look away for those seconds - stare at my shoes, the wall, the ceiling - but no, principle dictates that this must be resolved somehow.
Through use of the selective startup features of MSCONFIG, I determined that this pause is due to the loading of the SysTray executable. Given that the only startup service I had running in the system tray was SNDVOL32.EXE, I changed the option for having it load, thereby leaving just the clock. The startup "pause" persisted. I hid the clock. The startup "pause" yet persisted.
With no services loading at startup into the system tray at that point, what on earth could it possibly be doing in the background? Thankfully, there is one related registry key, containing a single hexadecimal value - with no description regarding its usage. Thanks, Microsoft!
Popular opinion on the subject suggests that SysTray.exe is absolutely essential, and must not be disabled or excluded from startup. Well, I did just that. The sun still rose this morning, the pause has been eliminated, and the system still functions. Applications also continue to run/display in the System Tray after being manually started. As far as I can tell, the only detrimental effect is that any Windows-related, "display icon in the taskbar" services (such as the aforementioned volume control) will not run in the system tray. Horror.
Or, is there more to it, and I'm courting disaster here?