So I ran across this old post from Raymond that explains, in fact, that the thing on the taskbar that holds your clocks and widgets is not, as I have always been led to believe, called the “system tray” or the “tray”. It is, as it turns out, the “taskbar notification area”.
I think that’s a misnomer too, because that would imply that the “notification area” only holds stuff that “notifies” you. This is more common today with Outlook notifications, MSN notification, aggregator notifications, and so on. But a lot of the stuff in there is more like “status keepers” (the clock, or your network icons) and “utilities that we don’t want on the screen”.
Either way, I guess I will have to change almost 10 years of habit and start calling it the notification area.
[Raymond’s post was referenced here by IanG]