I found the fix, and it was a stupid mistake that I should have realized earlier..
when I made that registry change (the one i listed in my original post), it apparantly didnt get written into the registry..i made the change, then went on with my business, and i guess some app changed the registry back..
then i changed the registry and did a soft reset afterwords, and it went right back to 1 (which makes the tray appear)
then i made the reg change and waited a few minutes, then did a soft reset and it fixed the problem..
thanks for all the replies
