I reinstalled Evernote a week or so back and every time I fired it up, a background window would also open containing the message “Could not add tray icon, error: An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist.” Every time this happened, I’d dismiss the message and move on with what I was working on.

This routine got old pretty quickly so I did what any other geek would do and Googled for the message. Apparently the message has been around for a while, with the suggested fix being to reinstall Evernote. So I uninstalled Evernote, waited a few minutes, and then reinstalled it. Then I went back into the application and a background window opened with the same message.

This time, after closing both the pop-up and the main application window, I took a look in the system tray and discovered that Evernote’s “running in the background” icon was also missing. I also realized I’d never been prompted to run the installer as an administrator.

I run my computer differently than most people – the user account where I do my day-to-day work has reduced privileges. There’s a separate login for anything requiring elevated privileges, such as installing software. Most installers will either prompt you to either login as an administrator, or else they’ll install to an alternate location (generally somewhere in the %APPDATA% folder). I didn’t dig too deeply, but my best guess is that Evernote was doing the latter, but the system tray icon requires something to be installed with higher privileges.

In the end, I uninstalled Evernote again and this time made sure to re-install with admin privileges.

I haven’t seen the error message since.

(Public domain image, via pixabay)