As for WHY does it happen; it's due to the way that the notification
system works. When an item is put into the tray, Windows logs it by looking
at the process that put it there (the EXE file) and the title (the infotip
that you get when you hover the mouse over the icon). Windows also keeps a
copy of the icon. In this way Windows can keep track of any and ALL items
that have been in the tray and allows you to set them manually. Whenever an
item is put into the tray, Windows compares the process and the title to see
if there is a match in it's notification database. If there is, then it
uses the settings for that item, if there is not, then it logs the new item
and defaults it to "Hide when inactive". The problem arises when the title
changes. You'll see that some items like the Task Manager often change
their title, in TM's case, it shows the CPU load "CPU Usage: 100%", "CPU
Usage: 5%", "CPU Usage: 43%", etc. This causes a little confusion with the
item lookup and as a result if you manually set it, close the item, then run
it again and go back to the Customize dialog, you'll see it's set to "Hide
when inactive" again. This is because when you started it again, Windows
looked it up but was not certain that the item in the tray was in fact the
same as the one you configured, so to be safe, it picks the one it THINKS is
right, and changes it to HWI.
How does this affect you? Well it's because this behavior happens to
any item that changes it's title at all. In your case the item starts out
with one title, then when Windows detects that the network cable is not
connected, it changes the title to reflect that and as a result, the tray
lookup craps out.
This is quite annoying since the whole purpose to the notification area
is to store items that NOTIFY you of stuff which means they HAVE to change
otherwise they're just notifying you that nothing has changed and that's
kind of like Homer Simpson's "Everything's Okay Alarm". Unfortunately when
it comes to items that change their titles AT ALL, there is nothing that can
be done to force it to stay; we'll just have to wait for Microsoft to come
up with a better way of handling it.
HTH
