Question

I’m writing an application that runs in the System Tray and notifies the user (i.e. makes one of those bubbles pop up) when something happens. The only problem is that the notifications only seem to work on Windows 7, and not Windows XP.

I’ve tested it on 2 Windows 7 computers (they’ve both worked) and 4 Windows XP computers (none of them have worked). No notification bubble is shown, and (as far as I know) no exceptions are thrown and everything else works as it should. I’ve even tested it on a Mac, and it worked, but it wasn’t too pretty.

Here is a sample of my code.

private static TrayIcon trayIcon;
...
trayIcon = new TrayIcon(trayImage.getImage());
...
if (!SystemTray.isSupported())
{
    System.out.println("SystemTray is not supported");
    return;
}
final PopupMenu popup = new PopupMenu();
final SystemTray tray = SystemTray.getSystemTray();
trayIcon.setToolTip("Widget Name Here [" + role + "]");
...
try
{
    tray.add(trayIcon);
}
catch (AWTException e)
{
    System.err.println("TrayIcon could not be added.");
    return;
}
...
//Here's where it doesn't work on XP
trayIcon.displayMessage("Connection error",
                "Could not connect to server, please check your internet/VPN "
                + "connection", TrayIcon.MessageType.ERROR);

Any help would be much appreciated.

UPDATE: Ok, I’ve just confirmed that it’s not a problem with my program, but a problem with the XP installations I’ve been testing them on. I ran the TrayIconDemo.java program found here on an XP computer and none of the notifications worked. I’m starting to think there’s nothing I can do to get it to work on one of these computers…

Answer 1

Okay, so I’ve finally found the solution to my problem. It turned out that the following key was set to 0 (false) by default on the installations I was testing on:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\EnableBalloonTips

To enable the notification bubbles, simply set the value to 1.