Hopefuly I've placed this in the correct forum. If not, could a mod please see to it that it is moved to the right one.

A few days ago my laptop developed an issue with the notification area. Up until then, that area displayed several icons, one of them being the icon for the anti virus program that I use. Trend Micro PC-cillin. Out of the blue, the icon just stopped showing up. I tried right clickng the taskbar > properties > customize to see if settings in there had changed but they hadn't. I even tried configuring the settings back and forth between: hide when inactive/always hide/always show and it has no effect. While in there, I had also noticed the icons displayed as "Past Items" are now misrepresented with incorrect icons. Here is a picture to see what I'm talking about- http://tinyurl.com/fx2qk
I checked the Task Manager to be sure that the program is running and it is.
Also, before posting here, I did a bit of resaerch and apperently this issue is a common one. I came across this http://windowsxp.mvps.org/trayicons.htm
and this
http://www.tech-pro.net/howto_013.html
I tried all the recomended fixes except downloading and running the file that the second link suggests, but nothing seems to work.
By the way, I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2 on a Dell XPSM140 machine.

Does anyone have any suggestions or possible ways to resolve this? Any insight into this is greatly appreciated.
Thank you