Things are going screwy...

[HyperHacker]

About maybe a year and a half ago I started noticing something odd on my computer. Often when I open the Start Menu, it wouldn't redraw; everything was black until I moved the mouse to it. I thought nothing of it since there were tons of other little bugs anyway. It survived a reinstall, which I found pretty strange, but there ended up being something wrong with that computer (various programs acted funny, I think the CPU was damaged) so I figured it was just another symptom.

That computer eventually got replaced, and its replacement seemed to work well, but eventually it started doing the same. It's been doing this on and off ever since.

Today my week-old laptop just started doing it! What the heck? What's causing this bizarre bug? I didn't change anything, I have very little installed on this laptop, and I never saw it before it just started happening at random.

More urgently, today for no apparent reason Explorer crashed on my PC a few hours ago, displaying a Data Execution Prevention error. Just now Winamp started doing the same on my laptop every time it was opened. It's running fine after disabling it for Winamp though, and I don't see any mention of security flaws on Winamp.com.

Also, my PC is still forgetting the primary screen's resolution and secondary screen's desktop icon positioning when it reboots. (Both are running from one video card, one using a DVI->VGA adapter; primary at 1600x1200, secondary at 1152x864, both at 75hz and 32-bit.) It's quite annoying. I made a batch script to reset the resolution but the icons are still in the wrong place (seems random) and the taskbar on the wrong screen.

[Treeman]

To disable DEP, you have to make a change to the BOOT.INI file in the root of the partition from which the computer boots. To get Windows to run, your only choice is now safe mode. To boot into safe mode, press F8 a few times after the BIOS has finished its booting and Windows begins to load. Once you have booted into safe mode, use these steps:

Right-click on My Computer and select Properties.

Click on the Advanced tab.

Click on the third button—settings for system start options.

Click on the Edit button to edit the boot.ini file.

Carefully edit the /NoExecute=OptIn string and change it to AlwaysOff. This part at the end of the line should now read: /NoExecute=AlwaysOff

Save and close the dialog boxes by clicking on OK.

See if this helps.

Treeman

[T D]

Check for malware. I would NOT EVER recommend disabling DEP.

[ravashaak]

I'm not a big fan of DEP myself, and I disable it on all of my machines. It causes too many problems for my tastes. However, YMMV.

- Ravashaak

[HyperHacker]

I do scans regularly with Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D and have AVG running in the background at all times. I don't think I'd want to turn DEP off, just curious as to why two different programs suddenly had a problem. I guess it could have been coincidence though, as I had a buggy Winamp plugin installed.

The Start Menu thing really baffles me though. I wonder if some patch or hotfix didn't mess it up. Maybe it's because I keep the taskbar on the right? There's a similar bug in that if the taskbar is translucent, when the menu appears it leaves an after-image on all translucent windows, but if the taskbar is opaque then it works fine, even if it covers another translucent window. The menu itself doesn't redraw when translucent either, which is another thing that worked fine until about the same time as the drawing in black problem started. I always used to have the taskbar and menu translucent without problems.

Edited August 22, 2006 by HyperHacker