Windows Server

Pat · Guest

I have this problem that's persisted for some time. For some reason all the
desktop icons and toolbar on my workstation (Windows XP Pro) will
occasionally disppear (leaving only the blue background ) when opening a
folder or moving files around. It doesn't seem to correlate to any
particular folder - just seems to happen randomly. It's not a "blue screen
of death" per se, because there are no error messages and any open
applications are still still running. I can go into the task manager
switch to any open application and it will appear. But once I close (or
minimize) it, it's back to a blank blue screen. If I log off and then log
on again, the desktop reappears as normal. I've checked the Windows XP
event logs for errors but there are none.

Does anyone know what might be going on? It's mainly a nusiance, but I
would like to correct whatever the problem is.

Thanks for any help.

Pat

Dave Nickason [SBS MVP] · Guest

Is anything getting logged in the system or app logs when this happens?
Try to correlate this happening to a specific action on your part, even if
the blue screen doesn't appear immediately after the suspected action.

For example, I had a workstation where something similar would happen
occasionally - some of the icons would disappear, and others would not
respond to a click or dbl-click. Turned out that it happened when the user
dragged a file's icon onto an Adobe Acrobat icon to convert the original
file to PDF. What ended up "fixing" it was having her either open the file
from Acrobat's File menu or drag the original file into an open Acrobat
window, rather than dragging one icon onto the other.

"Pat" <pat@reemoovethismp-m.com> wrote in message
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Pat · Guest

Thank Dave. I'll start checking the logs whenever it happens to see if I
can correlate it to something. As I mentioned, it happens so occasionally
(fortunately) that it's been hard to pin point.

Pat

"Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]" <gwdibble@NOSPAM.frontiernet.net> wrote in message
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Henry Craven · Guest

Sounds to me either a Graphics Driver issue,
or Graphics Memory Usage Issue.

--
Henry Craven {SBS-MVP}
Melbourne Australia

"Pat" <pat@reemoovethismp-m.com> wrote in message
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Pat · Guest

Thanks Henry.

Do you have any suggestions for how I can determine (or verify) which?

"Henry Craven" <IUnknown@Dot.Nyet> wrote in message
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Henry Craven · Guest

Wouldn't take much to either search for the latest graphics driver for
the card,
( or perhaps swap it out with a known good card ).

Closing down all 3rd party apps and enabling them one at a time should
show up which if any are conflicting with video performance.

Another -old- trick was to disable hardware acceleration.
Display Properties > Advanced > Troubleshoot.

--
Henry Craven {SBS-MVP}
Melbourne Australia

"Pat" <pat@reemoovethismp-m.com> wrote in message
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Pat · Guest

What makes it tough is that it's a very intermittent problem. What I need
to do is play around with it a little and see if I can find some combination
of actions that will consistently cause the problem. From there, it should
be easier to track down why using some of your suggestions.

Thanks again!

Pat

"Henry Craven" <IUnknown@Dot.Nyet> wrote in message
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