Hangouts hides itself in system tray

After extensive playing around with different settings, I was never able to get anything to work. It seems that any application that is updated is automatically relegated to the hidden part of the system tray, regardless of the old settings for the application.

However, Google released a Chrome app for Hangouts (as opposed to the old extension) that removes it from the system tray entirely. Using the app, Hangouts now has a proper Taskbar icon, and behaves more like a native extension. I know it doesn't exactly fix the original issue, but it removed the issue entirely for me.

Apparently there can be 2 issues.

The first one is a priviledge error. Shameless copy pasting:

Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application > right click chrome.exe > Properties > Compatibility > Change settings for all users > and tick "Run this program as an administrator"

Or this can be a profile error, can you try it with a different profile?

Hope this helps.

Icons show up in the system tray when an application is turned on or it makes a notification.

Make sure that the Task Bar has enough room to hold all your applications. The System may decide to filter your system tray if there's not enough space.

Setting your Task Bar to default options : Icon size and others may resolve your issues.

Notifications are generally generated by the System. If an application can hijack your system tray by making huge pop ups, update notification that slow your computer and other similar actions, you should remove it.

A few programs have their own system notifications like steam and Skype. Changing the Notification Settings in the Icon Tray have no effect.

It looks like this problem is caused by the installer of Hangouts and cannot be fixed except by repeatedly resetting the notifications data after every update of Hangouts.

You could of course complain about it in the right forums, but in the meantime I found a couple of programs that may be used as a workaround, as detailed below.

A C-program can be downloaded from the article New Windows Tray / Notification Manager is here.

The advantage of this program is that it has both GUI and command-line capabilities. Calling the program without parameters will display all the tray programs and their names (which are not always that easy to figure out). The command-line can be used to reset the the notifications for a program (warning: I don't use Chrome so its name below is just a place-holder) :

TrayManager.exe -t "Chrome's name" 2

As the tray icon data is read by Explorer when Windows starts and stays in memory, the above changes might seem to have no effect. One needs to restart Explorer, for example by a batch (.bat) file such as :

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
"<path-to-program>TrayManager.exe" -t "Chrome's name" 2
start explorer.exe

To ensure that this is always done when logging to Windows, you can set this script as a Logon script. Doing that is described in the article Forcing notification area Icons to always show in Windows 7 or Windows 8, which also contains an alternative to the above TrayManager program in the form of a PowerShell script, in case TrayManager does not work for you.