How to get back old service tray behavior?

Back in the olden days, I used to be able to visibly pin running icons in the service tray to let me know they were running in the background. This was particularly helpful with my VPN running with its status indicator letting me know at all times whether it was connected or not.

Is there any way to get back this behavior, besides pinning it to the taskbar and then running out of space on the taskbar itself?

Thanks

I use ExplorerPatcher to bring back the Windows 10 taskbar. With the taskbar icon size set to small, I can reduce the taskbar height to just a single row. I.e., unlock the taskbar, drag the top edge of the taskbar a little bit downward, and lock the taskbar again. In the middle is what's called a Taskbar Toolbar, with a bunch of shortcuts on it. Next to my Start button, I have put another Taskbar Toolbar that only has one shortcut on it ("%AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\Shows Desktop.lnk"). Using 3840×2160 display resolution, personally, I, find that Windows Settings | Display | Scale should be set to 150% for the best result. On my 55 inch 4K TV (that I use as my primary display through my laptop's HDMI output) it looks like this:



As you can see for yourself, a status icon takes up just 48 pixels in total width, or only one eightieth (1/80) of my screen width.

Hi and thanks for your response.

Yeah, I've heard there were problems using ExplorerPatcher with the latest build. I just want something simple to let me know that there are programs actively running in the background and not leaving me in the dark, constantly having to hit the Up arrow next to the clock and clicking on the icon. That is for the birds.

I'm not going to totally rule out ExplorerPatcher but if there still another way (without being able to use the service tray) and it not taking up my whole taskbar, then I'd most like to hear about it.

I'd even just settle for some kind of status indicator letting me know my VPN is running.

This whole thing has turned out to be a very poor design.

I haven't been able to reproduce those critical bugs that were reported on the latest build. I have been using ExplorerPatcher on the production channel of Windows 11 over the past 15 months, and I have always been able to get the Windows 10 taskbar back with it so, even after it was causing explorer to crash persistently on startup sometimes after finalizing the install of a Windows Cumulative Update, I could still fix that problem, simply by reinstalling ExplorerPatcher. The only exception to this was when I needed to repair Windows by performing an in-place upgrade, which happened to me only one time, and actually I doubt it had something to with ExplorerPatcher.