Removing NotifyIcon from the notification area

Question

Is it possible to remove NotifyIcon from the notification area (system tray) when an app terminates abruptly?

if no, how can I remove it when the app runs for the next time?

Answer 1

Abruptly? No. Your program has ceased to exist, so there's no opportunity to run any code to tell the shell that it should remove the icon.

To remove the icon, move your mouse over it. The shell will try to notify your program, realize there's nothing there anymore, and remove the icon by itself.

Answer 2

On Windows 7 and later, notify icons can be identified by a user-defined GUID. On earlier versions, they are identified by a combination of HWND and ID number instead. Since your app is not guaranteed to get the same HWND value the next time it runs, the only way you can do anything to an old icon that is identified by HWND is if you remembered the previous HWND value so you can use it to remove the old icon, before then using a new HWND to add a new icon. But with a GUID-identified icon, the GUID needs to be persistent (as it is stored in the Registry to store app settings associated with the icon), so you should be able to simply keep updating the existing icon as needed, or remove it if desired.