Google Hangouts hides its icon in the traybar

Because of idiotic firewall rules at my workplace I am forced to use Hangouts rather than Yahoo Messenger as an instant messenger. I am not going to rant here about which one is best, enough to say that most of my friends are on YM and being on Hangouts doesn't help. Hangouts has many annoyances for me, like its propensity to freeze when you lose Internet connection often or the lack of features that YM had. In fact I was so annoyed that I planned to do my own professional messenger to rule them all. But that's another story.

I am writing this post because of a behaviour of the Google Hangouts instant messenger (which, to be fair, is only a Chrome extension), mainly that after a while, the green traybar icon of the messenger goes in the "hidden icons" group. I have to customize it every day, sometimes twice, as it seems to reset this behavior after a period of use, not just on restarts. There is a Google product forum that discusses this here: System tray icon resets every time Chrome is started where you also see a few comments from your truly.

I immediately wanted to create a script or a C# program to fix this, but at first I just searched for a solution on the web and I found TrayManager, a C# app that does what the "Customize..." tray link does and more. One of the best features is a command line! So here is what you do after downloading the software and installing it somewhere: TrayManager.exe -t "Hangouts" 2. Now, probably that doesn't solve the problem long term. It is just as you would go into the Customize... link, but it's faster. Also, it has no side effects if run multiple times, so you can use Task Scheduler to run it periodically. Yatta!