There has been many people, and a few here in the forums miss the animated network icon similar to the one in previous versions of Windows. Unfortuately, the icon has been removed in Windows 7 as some of you already discovered. Doing a quick Google search, I found a program that was developed by people at itsamples.com that may work for you.
Network Activity Indicator for Windows 7
http://itsamples.com/network-activity-indicator.html
