When turning on activity animation thenetwork system tray icon does not show real-time network activity its fake using "animated gif". Inprevious windows server versions this tray icon shows real-time network activity. Is this just a misconfiguration or do I realy have to use third party applications for this prupose? Sincerely

It does show realtime activity, ie it flashed when your NIC does something. It does not however should you the amount of traffic or anyhing else, just the fact that traffic is passing through your NIC. If you want to see more information about your traffic you'll need a third party application.

The network activity flicker even if there is no network activity. It is clear that's just a fake animation of activity. I'm having the same problem on Windows Vista platforms. This is extremely important to eyedetect if there is any application sending or receiving undesirable data from internet like viruses, trojans, spywares or any other aplications (windows update... etc) . Thx,