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.