BartholomewCubbins

This should fix your problem permanently. This coarse, seemingly low-res, jagged/blocky/pixelated/ugly system tray icon problem is a really common yet surprisingly hard to figure out problem on Windows XP. Here's a pair of fixes--one to your exact issue, the other to the related coarse-IE-graphics issue (the internet explorer issue being if anything even more common). (Please forgive the length of this post--I'm trying to make the response comprehensive for those who luck-out and find this via Google.) Excerpted from an email I sent out to some friends with these problems: Bad system tray icons: if you have ugly/coarse/blurry icons in your Windows XP system tray (the little icon place in the lower right-hand part of the screen, i.e., the right-most part of the task bar), here's the weird but easy solution: * Right-click on an open part of the Windows Desktop * Click on Properties * Click on the Appearance tab * Click on the Advanced button * Select "Active Title Bar" from the Item drop-down menu * Change the font size to 9 * Click Okay * Click Okay or Apply That should do it--it works for most people, anyway. Ugly/Coarse/Pixelated/Jaggy/Bad Internet Explorer graphics (longer): If you still have a problem on some systems with Internet Explorer graphics looking weirdly coarse and ugly, try this fix. It does involve editing the registry, but if you run RegEdit (Start button, then Run, and type in "RegEdit" and hit enter, and then hit the "Home" key to navigate to the "top" of the registry tree) and follow the Microsoft instructions for "Add the UseHR Registry Entry" exactly, except changing the 1 to a 0 (zero) at the end--you want to turn scaling OFF--it should be very safe. Just exit from RegEdit when you're done. (If you don't see the "UseHR" value under "Main", then I suppose this isn't the cause of the problem on that computer.) The remaining text from the article gives some background information--if you're uncomfortable editing the registry, simply switching the dpi/font size setting to "normal size" fixes the problem for many people (though you'll have smaller fonts throughout the system then), but NOT all, perhaps because we applied the changes without rebooting, violating the article's step 6 (it did change the size from "Large" to "Normal" without a reboot, but did not eliminate the coarse graphics problem). This UseHR registry change from 1 to 0 completely fixed the problem when merely changing the DPI did not. If for some reason you don't like the results (previously coarse/ugly IE graphics may be noticeably smaller), it's easy to change it back--and certainly, if you do not have this precise problem, do NOT make any changes to your registry! I'd suggest exiting all instances of Internet Explorer first, though maybe that's not necessary. And again, I believe that only the final part about UseHR is necessary; I provide the first part in case you want to "do the whole thing" out of paranoia, or if changing UseHR to zero alone doesn't work. Here goes: Microsoft: how to activate scaling (though we want to DEactivate it, changing the "1" to a "0" [zero]) Internet Explorer 6 and later automatically adjusts the scale on higher resolution systems when the dpi setting is higher than 96 dpi and the "UseHR" registry value is added to the registry. These are usually done by the manufacturers of higher resolution systems. Set the DPI These are the steps for changing the dpi setting on your system. 1. Right-click the Windows desktop to display the context menu. 2. Click Properties on the context menu to display the Display Properties dialog. 3. Click the Settings tab on the Display Properties dialog to display the Settings tab. 4. Click the Advanced button on the Settings tab to display the monitor properties dialog. 5. Select a dpi setting in the Display frame of the monitor properties dialog to change the dpi setting. 6. Restart your system to allow the changes to take effect. Add the UseHR Registry Entry The UseHR value is added to the Main key under "Internet Explorer" as follows: * HKEY_CURRENT_USER o Software + Microsoft # Internet Explorer * Main UseHR = dword:00000001 [Make this 0 instead of 1 to eliminate coarse IE graphics!] Then just exit the registry editor, restart IE, and you should be good.