Processes and System Tray Items on Taskbar

Came across this very odd incident:
User was using her laptop, not pushing it too hard, didn’t have 1000 items open. Didn’t press any keys or anything when this happened. The task bar filled up (a few rows) and on her screen where small boxes, what seemed at the time to be minimized programs.

Going over some of the names of the windows, they happened to be system tray items and Windows Processes actually showing as minimized windows, both on the desktop, and in the taskbar.

The only change that recently happened, was I bumped the memory of the laptop from 512MB to 2GB.

Just wondering if anyone has ever seen or heard of this before, as searching for an answer came up with too much non-related items.