Why is WMC "green button" icon now appearing in system tray??

[DSperber]

Just started happening yesterday. Maybe it's purely a coincidence, but just two days ago I installed EPG123 1.3.8.20. Before that I'd been at 1.3.7.30 for quite a while, and the WMC "green button" icon never appeared in the system tray.

The "green button" icon used to appear nightly, when WMC started its Guide update. Well, that doesn't happen any longer with EPG123 installed as the whole WMC Guide functionality is "declined" and not installed when configuring WMC. And that's how things have worked for years.

All of a sudden, starting yesterday, I now see the "green button" at no predictable time, and it remains present and visible also for an unpredictable amount of time (although it's typically long).

For example, yesterday afternoon I noticed it. Nothing was recording. The context menu suggested that an update of some kind was going on, since the "cancel update" choice was not grayed-out.



And right now, middle of the night, there happens to be a recording going on. And there's the "green button" again, this time it is the "update data now" choice which is not grayed out.



So what's going on?

[IT Troll]

It is due to the maintenance tasks which were added in v1.3.8.0

[DSperber]

So, an hour and a half later it's still present. Now it has the "cancel update" active again. What is this "update"?

Does it ever disappear? What is actually going on when the icon is present? How long should it be seen? Once a day, more than once a day?

[IT Troll]

It is the update that would normally come from Microsoft but is no longer available. I believe that in v1.3.8.20 this part of the maintenance task is disabled. Perhaps the status icon is just getting confused because mcupdate is being run but the update part is disabled.

[DSperber]

Well, it's now been onscreen for 3 hours. Doesn't seem right, or is it?

[garyan2]

I've noticed this as well on the latest version, but I believe I also saw this on previous versions. If you want to run an experiment, go in to Task Scheduler and disable the \Microsoft\Windows\Media Center\"mcupdate" task. I've been running a long experiment to intercept all calls through that task as well as direct calls to mcupdate.exe and found that with v1.3.8.x and downloads disabled, mcupdate will be called when opening WMC with "-u -nogc". The -u flag is to do an update which probably triggers the tray icon. I haven't reverted back yet to see if this behavior is different with previous versions.

If you want to make the tray icon go away, open Task Manager and end the ehtray.exe process.

[DSperber]

If you want to make the tray icon go away, open Task Manager and end the ehtray.exe process.

It's now about 9 hours later, and the icon is still there.

Is there any harm in ending the ehtray process? Will whatever function is supposed to re-occur in a few days time get still started automatically and correctly at that time?

Do you have ideas how to make the icon disappear on its own, when its function is complete? Isn't that how WMC used to operate?

[garyan2]

No harm in ending ehtray.exe. It is shown due to an event, probably mcupdate related, and is probably waiting for another event to occur to close it. It doesn't actually control anything, it can just initiate some processes and will wait for it to signal it is complete or provide more information.

One other thing you can do, if it really bothers you, is to go to Control Panel->Notification Area Icons, and configure the WMC icon to 'Hide icon and notifications'. Note that the icon actually has to be currently visible to make that change.