Alright, here’s some Sun Java silliness I ran across a while back and just found the fix for.
If you’re running Java applications on Windows, you may have noticed that Sun likes you to see a Java icon in the system notification area when a Java application is running. You can get rid of it by right-clicking on it and selecting “Hide icon,” but it’ll just come back next time. There’s an option in the Java control panel to hide the icon… But sometimes, in Vista, it shows up even though you’ve told it to hide.