I have been caught out myself before with programs acting like that. As you say if you don't notice them open up minimsed in the tray you think nothing has happened.
I just went through the same thing... and all the time there EasyTune6 was -- in the "hidden icons" section of the task bar!-- I probably spent at least an hour of time trying to find out what was up with this EasyTune6 thing... uninstalling and reinstalling... all a total waste of my time for something so simple that was not setup to be logical, and not mentioned in the manual. Disappointed in Gigabyte there.
So now I have it and it seems I am better off using a 3rd party app? oh well... live and learn... (unfortunately that doesn't really apply when I only build or upgrade every other year ;-) )
Great Forum... glad I found it! I found no mention of this forum on the US Gigabyte website...
http://www.gigabyte.us/ which I feel is really a disservice to Gigabyte US customers as that is where you go first for help. It made finding answers real hit and miss.
Now if I can just get my system to allow me to access the BIOS once again, and boot-up at all with a usb 3.0 card reader plugged in, and be able to use all 1866 mghz of my ram... and maybe bump up the processor speed a bit... I will be a happy guy... til then..still not satisfied.
GA-990FXA-UD3
AMD FX-8120
G.SKILL Sniper Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL9D-8GBSR
Seagate ST3500630AS Hard Drive
512MB GeForce 9800 GTX+ (EVGA)
BIOS Award Software International, Inc., Version F5 Date 10/13/2011