Windows tray context menu can appear behind the taskbar after launching from Start Menu

[claell]

Hi, thanks for the crate.

We are seeing a Windows-specific tray menu issue in a Tauri 2 app that uses the current tray stack (tauri -> tray-icon).

Summary:
After launching the app from the Windows Start Menu, the tray icon context menu can appear behind the Windows taskbar / taskbar shell instead of above it. Normal launches do not seem to trigger this as reliably.

What we observed:

• Launching the app from Explorer works normally
• Launching the app from the Windows Start Menu can leave tray context menus in a bad z-order state
• This does not only affect our tray icon consistently; it can seem to disturb tray menu behavior more generally until the shell state settles
• We can still reproduce normal app focus handback separately, so this does not look like only a generic focus-restore bug in our app

Environment:

• Windows 11
• tauri 2.10.3
• tray-icon 0.21.3
• App starts hidden/in tray and eagerly creates a hidden popup window for low first-use latency

Relevant shell details we observed while debugging:

• Start Menu launch foreground window class: ApplicationManager_DesktopShellWindow
• Tray helper foreground window class during tray interaction: tray_icon_app
• We also saw taskbar/flyout-related shell classes such as Shell_TrayWnd and XamlExplorerHostIslandWindow_WASDK

Why I think this may belong in the tray stack:
From the Windows docs, notification-area menu handling usually requires:

1. SetForegroundWindow(hwnd)
2. TrackPopupMenu(...)
3. posting a benign WM_NULL after the menu interaction

In tray-icon's Windows implementation, I can see SetForegroundWindow(hwnd) and TrackPopupMenu(...), but I do not see the usual WM_NULL follow-up. I�m not certain this is the root cause, but it seems like the clearest standards gap.

Relevant docs:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-trackpopupmenu

Questions:

• Is this a known Windows shell edge case around Start Menu launches?
• Should tray-icon post WM_NULL after TrackPopupMenu on Windows?
• Is there already a preferred workaround for apps that start from the Start Menu directly into the tray?

If helpful, I can also provide a minimal reproduction app.

[claell]

Thanks again for the quick fix and release. I tested this downstream today (2026-05-02) by updating our Tauri app to tauri 2.11.0, which pulls in tray-icon 0.23.1, then rebuilding the NSIS installer and installing that build on Windows. Unfortunately I can still reproduce the tray context menu appearing behind the taskbar after launching from the Start Menu.

So from our side, #311 / tray-icon 0.23.1 does not seem to fully fix the issue. We can add a screenshot or more reproduction details separately, but I wanted to note the failed validation while it is fresh. Would you consider reopening this issue?

[claell]

Screenshot of the problem:

Expected: