Items on system tray reverting to 'hide when inactive'

I have a system tray icon I'd like to show all the time. I set it to 'show' in the customize notification icons area. A little while later it disappears and I check and it had reverted to 'hide when inactive.' This happens repeatedly. I looked up the issue and I found people wanting to get rid of stuff in their system tray which is not helpful. I also found a taskbar repair tool but it's for XP and it didn't seem to do anything. Is there something else I should try?

Vista Home Premium 32-bit, SP2