Usually, a failure of some notification icon is a result of something
needing to wait a while after startup to load. There are a number of ways to
address that. My favorite is to launch a script in startup that waits a
while, then toggles the notification (tsr) app.
--startWait.vbs--
set shell=createobject("wscript.shell")
wscript.sleep 3000
shell.run "%windir%/system32/sndvol32"
--end file--
You can close the app any number of ways, depending on your experience
level. You have some tsr grabbing focus during starup that is not allowing
your sound driver to load. You probably need a better sound driver.