Disappearing icon

[possibilities]

I have dial up. When I connect, a little icon appears on the lower right of my screen, to indicate that I am on line. It also tells me the throughput speed (which varies wildly, because we have problems with the phone lines here-- this is also why I don't have DSL-- it's not available yet while they upgrade the lines).

ANYWAY: a few days ago I noticed that when I connect, the icon doesn't appear anymore. I liked having it, because the visual cue would help me remember to disconnect at the end of sessions, and thus prevent me from tying up my phone service all day by mistake.

Also, I got worried that it could be a Trojan, somehow designed to disable the indicator, so I wouldn't notice untoward activity? Even if not, sudden unwanted changes to the system seemed like a bad thing.

McAfee says I'm clean, but it still bothered me.

I did a system restore to before the problem began, and in fact this did undo the problem... sort of. The "connected to the internet" icon does appear now. But sometimes it disappears in the middle of the session, although my internet connection continues.

I just wondered if anyone happens to know if there is some malicious code out there that would cause this to happen, or if it might be another known bug that I could fix.

[FastLearner]

Not sure why the icon is disappearing. But if you right click on your modem connection and choose Properties, you can set it to automatically hang up after x minutes of inactivity. So at least you won't have to worry about typing up the phone line all day.

Also are we sure that when your icon disappears, "the Internet connection continues."? The only way to test this is to try to load another page once the icon disappears, just to make sure the page is not being loaded from the cache....

[possibilities]

Thank you for your reply.

Bizarrely, after a week or so, the icon has reappeared and remained consistent.

It does seem that the connection had remained while the icon was gone, as I was successfully able to navigate in its absence. That was a good idea to set an auto-disconnect, though. I will do that as a stopgap if the problem recurs.