From #Windows: TrayStatus ‘An Unknown Error Has Occurred’
Came across a doozy today.
I’m a big fan of TrayStatus, a neat utility for Windows from BinaryFortress. It provides a number of visual indicators right into the Window System Tray and in my case (as a Surface Book user) I use it for disk I/O and (when writing) Caps Lock status.
It does a bunch of other stuff also, which you can see from the screen shot below:

Anyhoo.
On boot, my usually reliable Windows 10 startup was marred by a modal from TrayStatus stating:
An unknown error has occurred. Cannot load Counter Name data because an invalid index '' was read from the registry.
Now I would not call myself a Windows expert by any stretch but when anything mentioning the word ‘Counter’ comes along, I’m straight into the Command Prompt to shake out a lesser known Windows utility called ‘LODCTR’.
There is a query mode for LODCTR:
LODCTR /Q
But on this occasion I rolled straight in with a rebuild:
LODCTR /R
Which threw an error:
Error: Unable to rebuild performance counter setting from system backup store, error code is 2
Which I have seen before. Now here comes the science bit – just run it again!
C:\WINDOWS\system32>lodctr /r Info: Successfully rebuilt performance counter setting from system backup store
Why does it work second time around? I’m not entirely sure, but I know that in most of the cases of failure I have seen, the second time is the charm.
Weird huh?
more to follow.