A way to ensure that a system tray icon is removed

Question

Is there a way to guarantee that your system tray icon is removed?

To add the system tray icon you do:

Shell_NotifyIcon(NIM_ADD, &m_tnd);

To remove the system tray icon you do:

Shell_NotifyIcon(NIM_DELETE, &m_tnd);

What I want to know: what if you application crashes? The icon stays in your system tray until you mouse over. Is there a way to guarantee that the icon will be removed, even when the application crashes? I would prefer not to use structured exception handling for various reasons.

Another case that I want to handle is when the process is killed, but doesn't necessarily crash.

Answer 1

You could have a separate, simpler (and thus presumably more robust) program which monitors your application. This program could actually launch your program and then monitor the process. Yeah, this is a very ugly solution.

Answer 2

Hmm, you can always have an external monitor process call SendMessage with the WM_PAINT message to the system tray window (which you would have to do based on the class of the window). That should remove the icon which is no longer valid.