Most annoying WinXP bug ever

[Yitch]

Every couple days or so, for no particular reason, 95% of my desktop gets "painted" gray. It is really annoying because it hides my desktop icons! An unlabeled folder also shows up on my taskbar (2nd from the left). Has anybody every encountered this bug? I've only noticed it on my system (I use several WinXP systems on a regular basis):

Athlon 500@700, 512 MB PC100 SDRAM
Creative Labs Riva TNT2 Ultra
Creative Labs DVD hardware decoder and 12x DVD-ROM
SB Audigy Value (OEM) sound card

Thanks in advance,

Yitch

[Smizack]

I hate that one file that always starts up by itself... What's it called again??


Oh yeah, Explorer.exe.:D
Windoze in general just makes me mad, but realy can't talk to much trash on XP. Other than SP1 (wich should be damned to hell).

BTW, I don't think that's a windows bug. Seems like a corrupt vid driver to me.

[Yitch]

Smizack,

I've tried many different detonator drivers and they've all given me the same bug. :( I've even tried the Creative drivers.

Any suggestions on which driver to use? My video card is a Riva TNT2 Ultra. I suppose it's time to buy a new video card. It's hard to believe that I paid $400 CDN for that card a few years ago!

Thanks,
Yitch

[Smizack]

Hmmm.. I can't find any for XP. That may be your problem.
I had a voodoo 5500 before they made drivers for xp, and it was horrible. I had an old 16mb nvidia that would smoke it because of that.

[Attitudx]

this is what I found at
the page (http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/tnt2u32/index2.html)

Creative has done a great job developing drivers for this board. They are fast and rock solid in reliability. NVIDIA also develops and releases drivers for their products. This gives you a second source for drivers in the unlikely event that the Creative drivers are not optimal for your application. The supported operating systems are Windows 95/98 and Windows NT 4.0. For a card aimed at gamers it is nice to see that Creative Labs decided to make NT 4.0 drivers, unlike 3dfx with their Voodoo3 boards. Two notes on the drivers:the page (http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/tnt2u32/index2.html)

[Svenn]

I'm running a GF4 Ti4600 and it happens to me too... I have no idea what it is. The only way I've found to fix it is to open task manager and end explorer.exe... then start it back up through the task manager... I've tried all sorts of drivers for my vid card too.

[Yitch]

Svenn,

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that next time this bug occurs. For all those people that think WinXP is "solid as a rock", shame on you! It's a great OS but Win2000 is the most stable MS operating system out there.

Yitch

[Attitudx]

honestly I have had no problems period other than when running my 950 at 1.02ghz my burner has problems. My vid is fine I can play UT2003 with the graphics set high and I have a Hercules 4500 64mg vid card. Using the latest xp drivers for it. I dont have vid problems, I dont have crash problems although this weekend I am formating and dual booting windows 2000 and xp on the same system just cuz I can.

[KnightElite]

Originally posted by Attitudx
honestly I have had no problems period other than when running my 950 at 1.02ghz my burner has problems. My vid is fine I can play UT2003 with the graphics set high and I have a Hercules 4500 64mg vid card. Using the latest xp drivers for it. I dont have vid problems, I dont have crash problems although this weekend I am formating and dual booting windows 2000 and xp on the same system just cuz I can.

I had the same issues with my burner at higher FSB as well.... new IDE cable rectified the problem.

Yitch: Have you checked for virii lately? If you don't have a virus scan (I don't) you can use http://housecall.antivirus.com/housecall/start_corp.asp to give yourself a free virus check, just in case that's the issue. Have you tried formatting and reinstalling to see if that fixes things? And are you running SP1? I had to uninstall it from my system, since it gave me all sorts of random errors and crashes I didn't get prior to installing it.

[Yitch]

KnightElite,

It's not a virus problem and I reformat once a month on average. I've had the problem each time I've reinstalled. I haven't installed SP1. It must be my flaky Nvidia card driver.

Yitch

[Firelord-OCHW]

I had this with a GeForce 3 and GeForce 2 GTS but as soon as I swapped to GF4, Windows XP Pro and SP1 and the latest dets it disappeared!!! :confused:

[Attitudx]

i dont have sp1 i like to hack my start button and my understanding with sp1 that is not available yet. Ok now for xp After reformatting and reinstalling I get rundll errors when it boots up and my boot up screen stays forever almost kinda faded then gets bright and goes on in. this is one of those times when it isnt broke dont fix it

[DesireToFire]

I have a feeling this may be to do with some spyware thats been installed on youre computer, try running the latest Ad-aware to get rid of anything.