The tray control (nsctrl.exe) is no longer required as of NovaBACKUP version 19.6, so the service and the UI will not start the tray control process when opened/started.
The only thing that will start the tray control now is the Windows startup shortcut put in place when installed.
If a user restarts the software services, the tray control is not restarted.
The reasoning behind this was for multiple reasons.
We were seeing in the field that the nsctrl on machines where there are multiple people logging in (T-Systems when they RDP into their machine, Terminal Service Servers, Windows Servers that have people RDPing to them) where the traycontrol could be running by another user already, and this was causing issues as it is not multi-user-aware.
This would cause issues with pop-ups/messages that could get stuck forever so backups wouldn’t run, error conditions when you would try to open up the software, sometimes hanging in the UI as the UI was trying to talk to the tray that another user had open and could hang the UI, and the thing that really was causing heartache was the inability to write some config/license files if that tray control was opened by a user that didn’t have admin rights.
This was ultimately the root cause of the issue where an xSP client will all the sudden not be able to run because the license expired.