SecureCRT and Windows 7 - The Case of the Magically Disappearing Window

Ever since I upgraded my copy of SecureCRT to 6.5.1 on Windows 7 x64, I started noticing really strange behavior. Occasionally, my SecureCRT window would just 'disappear'. What do I mean by 'disappear'? The SecureCRT icon on the Windows 7 taskbar, which appears like this when a window is open:

would suddenly change to this, which is what an icon looks like when the process has no windows open:

I could still see SecureCRT.exe running, but didn't find any windows for it, even in the Alt+Tab menu. Nothing appeared in my system tray either except for the network connection, volume and system time information.

Once this happened even after a system restart (isn't that the usual fix for everything?! ;)) I got curious. Eventually, I realized that this happened each time I minimized the window. Somehow, minimizing the window is muscle memory for me now and I don't really notice I'm doing it until I consciously try.

Minimizing a windows shouldn't ever cause the window to just 'disappear' so I started looking at the different SecureCRT settings and noticed a curious "Minimize to Activator" setting that was checked, and seemed suspicious. Unchecking it was all it took to restore sanity.

What is this 'Activator'? It's an icon that sits in your system tray. But Windows 7, by default, hides away all my system tray icons so I had no idea this even existed until I started investigation this issue. This is the 'Activator':

SecureCRT removes the window and sticks it into this Activator. Without any sort of visual cue or notification bubble. By default. Ugh! To restore it, you need right click the icon and select the "Restore" option. Umm... isn't that the whole point of Windows' built-in minimize implementation?

This seems like a poorly designed feature, especially given how Windows 7 treats tray icons (and I know SecureCRT v6.5.1 has some Windows 7 specific features so this isn't accidental). Making the process 'appear' like it's not running and sticking into into the 'Activator' (why isn't it called 'system tray icon'?) instead seems like bad design. If anything, this should definitely not be on by default.

Ed: Title inspired by Mark Russinovich's blog posts

Update: Just got an email response back from SecureCRT's support staff to a query about I this I had sent last night. She clarified "... the global option is **not** enabled by default. The session option by default is a "tri-state" option, meaning it uses the setting found in the global option."