You look at the corner of your screen and notice your antivirus, volume, or OneDrive icon has vanished.
Solutions:
To understand tray icons, you just need to look at the usual suspects found on almost every computer: what is a tray icon
Pro Tip: You can also drag tray icons directly to reorder them or move them in/out of the overflow menu by dragging to/from the chevron ^.
Example:
The icon is visible, but clicking or right-clicking does nothing.
Solutions:
Imagine you install Spotify. You open it, play music, then click the “X” in the corner. The main window closes—but music keeps playing? That’s because Spotify is still running in the background. You’ll find its tiny green (or black) icon in the tray. Right‑click it to pause, skip, or fully exit the app.
That small, quiet icon is the real control panel. You look at the corner of your screen
In one sentence: A tray icon is the silent, always-visible signal that a background program is running, giving you instant status updates and one-click control without opening a full window.