Icon does not show on tray, display does not work

[tbnews2]

I followed the sticky, and I appreciate you posting it, but it did not solve my problem. Here's my issue:

This happened on both my Windows 7 and XP machines. The product worked normally for about a week. Then the taskbar icon disappeared and the display stopped working.

After multiple uninstalls and driver re-installations (via the StarTech CD, StarTech website, and DisplayLink website), I could not get the icon to reappear.

The two DisplayLink programs appear in the Control Panel Add/Remove program sections. DisplayLink exe files also appear in my running processes in the Task Manager: in 7 it's "DisplayLinkUserAgent.exe"; in XP "DisplayLinkManager.exe". They both also appear in the Services section and are both listed as "started".

The green light is on on the product box.

Here's the problem: on both computers, there is nothing in the Device Manager under "USB Display Adapters". There isn't even a "USB Display Adapters" section. There is a "Universal Serial Bus controllers" but that's obviously different. all my other USB devices work fine (thumb drives, mouse, etc.)

So I guess this sounds like a defective hardware issue? The weird part is that, when I plug the device fresh into a computer, the Windows USB driver thing does its recognition process, but the icon never appears. So it's seeing something from the device.