My system tray icons are almost unrecognizable whenever I use transparency, especially with dark themes. They are just blurry blobs for the most part. Turning off transparency helps but it's not as clean as XP's system tray . I have turned off all text effects that I know of and it still wont go away. Everything else looks fine.

I've tested this on a laptop with an ATI X700 card and on my desktop with an NVIDIA 6600GT. No differences.

Any clues, this is very frunstrating and since I've just regiteres Winstep, I'd like to get this resolved.

Laptop details:
Asus M6VA
XP Pro
2.0 GB of RAM
128mb ATI X700 Video card with up2date catalyst drivers

Any chance of a screenshot? You can send it to support@winstep.net if you are unable to post it here.

Also, have you tried disabling the shadow effect on the systray?

Here is a screenshot. I have disabled icon shadows but could not find where to change the font settings for the systray. I checked the help but it doesn't talk about how to manipulate the drop shadows.

This "issue" is theme dependent so it must be a config setting someplace. If I use brisa pixOS the problem goes away. If I use Aero Lowres, Aerosky or atmospherica I have systray problems as well as workshelf text display problems. I email you another screenshot showing you the workshelf text.

Another update on this. Workshelf looses the skin it applies making the shelf transparent and the text hard to read. That second screen shot I sent is a picture of exactly that situation. The shelf should be black but it is not. I ahve the shelf set to auto hide and raise on mouseover. This has occurred using the themes atmospherica as well as Brisa.

Sorry for the late reply...

Systray handling does not work very well with 'animated' or 'informational' systray icons. This is because NextSTART is not notified of systray icon changes, it is only aware of systray size changes (i.e.; when an icon has been added or removed from the systray).

What I suggest is to create a new hotspot, give it an activation area of 0,0,0,0, assign it with a hot key (for instance, CTRL F9), associate it to a Hotspot Action of 'Run Internal Command' and select 'Refresh Systray' as the command.

Now, whenever you want to force a 'refresh' of the contents of the systray, all you have to do is press CTRL F9.

The Systray drop shadows are a very simple effect, with no settings available for them other than on/off.

Regarding the difficulty of reading the tab text in WorkShelf (which I could see on the screenshot you sent me by email), this is because of the font size and white background combination. Try increasing the tab text font size a bit so the 'outline' text effect works better, or try changing the effect to 'drop shadow'.

As for the disappearing background, I'm looking into this. I've seen it before, but it only seems to happen under very specific conditions. Looks like one of the APIs fails to stretch the bitmap properly.

I added the hotspot. Not real change. I guess most of my icons fall into the category of informational or animated. Take heart. Every shell replacement or desktop tool I've used that messes with the systay has issues. Most shells (bbox4win, Sharpe, aston) loose items from the tray. Freakin MS!!!

As for workshelf loosing background images, it happens much less if I don't use the mouse over activation. I don't use WS much at , I pretty much use NS popup menus and Nexus Docks. I just hide WS behind my startbar.