Fix Corrupt or Blank Windows 7 System Tray Icons

I see this a lot where I work and while I haven't yet been able to track down the source of the problem, the fix is as follows:

1. Open Regedit via Start-->Search
2. Open Task Manager via CTRL-ALT-DEL
3. Find Explorer.exe in the list and end the Process
4. Go back to Regedit
5. Select HKEY_CURRENTUSER
6. Click Edit-->Find
7. Search for IconStreams
1. Or navigate directly to HKEY_CURRENTUSER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify\
8. Delete IconStreams
9. Search or navigate to PastIconStreams
10. Delete this key as well
11. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL
12. Start Task Manager
13. Click File-->Run
14. Type, Explorer.exe 
15. The issue should be resolved.

Explorer Freezing and Crashing in Windows 7

I've come across this over 10 times now over the last year or so supporting about 400+ users. I'm not sure of the root cause but the behavior you will generally see is Explorer stop responding, Windows tries to find a solution in vain, and then explorer just restarts. This will occur every time you Right-Click on an explorer object such as

• The Computer option in the Start Menu
• The Taskbar
• Any File or folder

Disable Windows 7 Backup Monitoring via the Action Center using Group Policy

Windows 7 has a pretty well done Backup and Restore feature that allows users to backup their data manually or on a set schedule. This feature and it's status feed back into the Action Center which will prompt you to do your backups if they haven't been setup or performed in some time. While I agree with the sentiment a large majority of users I support do not use the feature and instead prefer simple intermittent copying and pasting onto an external drive or cloud backups via Dropbox.

The Action Center caused a good amount of support calls as its repeated messages that "something was wrong" made users think that something needed to be fixed. Something did need to be fixed: we needed to turn off monitoring of of Backup and Restore on every users machine. Thank goodness for Group Policy.