weird horizontal lines on startup button

[nspeer]

I have these colored, parallel, horizontal lines obscuring my start button, and pretty much any control button in any window (for example on the minimize , maximize, and close window buttons, and on the upper and lower arrows on the left side scroll bar in a window or over where the radio buttons should be when you control alt delete and have to choose restart or shutdown,etc
What's up with this?
Neil

 

[MA5]

Hi nspeer
Do you get the same effect when:
- In Safe Mode
- Using deferent refresh rates
- Using deferent pixel sizes
- With a deferent Vid card

If the answer to all the above is yes then the icons dll file might be corrupt. Replace it and repost.
Good luck

 

[nspeer]

Funny thing is, the problem is not present at boot up. It only begins about 10 min. after boot up and after opening and closing several windows. It does occur at different screen resolution settings. I am not certain it happens in safe mode.
could it be a driver issue?

 

[mudskipper]

If this only occurs after 10 minutes of use, have you considered a heating issue? Try cooling it and see if the issue goes away.

 

[nspeer]

I do have a card fan mounted just below the graphics card.
I never had this problem before my 20 Gig hard drive crashed and I had to install a new (40Gig) one.
While I was at it, I updated the video driver on my geforce2 mx 32meg(I think I was using a 6.something before...yeah, really old). I also "upgraded" to a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card and used the latest drivers and more recently a Beta driver set that was designed to work with DirectX 8.1 (the other was made for 7.0 I believe). BEFORE THE HARD DRIVE CRASH, I WAS EXPERIENCING NO PROBLEMS...well, except for an occasional computer hand while surfing using IE 5.0.

Now,my computer hangs up during surfing A LOT. It also freezes after it has been idle for a while or if I am downloading a large file from KaZa or something. It froze up yesterday when I tried to play a song with Windows Media Player. Most annoying is that when I try to play my favorite game, IL2 (ok, I'm addicted to it), everything is fine for the first 10-15 minutes of play. Then, my box suddenly freezes and whatever sound is playing at the moment of the hang just continues to play on and on. I have to hard reboot to get out.
I should tell you that the sound card troubleshooting sez that the card has to have it own unique IRQ #. It does'nt. It shares #5 with the Geforce2. However, since the video card is in an AGP slot and the soundcard is in a PCI slot, is it still a relevant issue?

 

[mudskipper]

IRQ sharing is definitely still a possible issue within the game or multimedia.

If you suspect your sound card, you could try to move the IRQs apart....and just for grins and giggles, you can try your old sound card again... If the old one works, then you have something to go on. If not, possibly continue addressing video issues.

When you say that you tried different display settings, did you try 640X480 and 16 colors? If you can do that and surf w/out locks, then go after the video related problems.

 

[bladdered]

I have recently formatted my hard drive and re-installed windows 98 and I am now experiencing the exact same problems you describe. Did you solve the problem and if so can you give me any pointers?

 

[nspeer]

Well, I think I have this problem licked (for now). I now have a GeForce 3 Ti 200 (I upgraded the Geforce 2 Mx). At first, I had the exact same problem. So, I tried different detonator drivers and low and behold, the 23.12 driver made the problem go away. Only problem is, my computer locks up alot. But, I think this may be from heat and I am looking into additional cooling. Let me know if this helped.
Neil

 

[bladdered]

Thnaks for the quick reply.

Having discussed it with colleagues I have decided to format my hard disk, remove all the cards, except for the video, and then reinstall windows. As of last night this is what I did and I installed the driver that came with the video card and the system seem s to be behaving. If this continues I wll install the sound card and take it from there.

In other words I will take one step at a time rather than reinstall everything in one foul swoop as I did first time round.

 

[bladdered]

Question of NSPEER.

Do you have norton system works and personnal firewall installed because I am having a bit of an issue with it on my now bare system? It is not crashing my system but it is taking 30-40% of my cpu resource every 2 secs which on a busys system could cause crashes?

 

[biddy]

A couple things for all.
1.) Norton is noted for disrupting video if you do have any semi latest norton products try uninstalling Norton reinstalling the video driver restart then install Norton back on.
2.) For any XP users try moving the color scheme down to 16 bit XP and NVIdia cards are noted for there constant problems
3.) For the over overheating problem check the Air flow of the fans the airfolw is designed to go front to back or vice versa. if you have a fan shooting up into space that is not proper air flow if you two fans both pointing in you will still have heating issues
See if any of those work

 

[nspeer]

Well, the weird horizontal lines on my icons are gone now that I am using a differnt Nvidia driver (23.12b) on my Geforce 3 Ti 200. I still have the problem on my 'start' button, but, I can live with that. My problem now is that my computer hangs all the damn time!

I have taken care of the IRQ conflict I had. Now my video card (GeForce 3 Ti 200 w/23.12b driver) and soundcard (Turtle Beach Santa Cruz with latest (beta) driver) do not share the same IRQ. The video card is on IRQ 5 and the soundcard on IRQ 3...for what it's worth. I now have 512 meg RAM on my Athlon 1.2g box and a VIA motherboard with updated 4in1 drivers. I run Win98SE. I have DirectX 8.1 and DXDIAG shows everything to be o.k. I am monitoring the CPU temps with Motherboard Monitor and, after adding two 80mm, 39 cfm exhaust fans to the back of my case, I still run a little warm (up to around 44-49 C in graphics or CPU intensive programs). So, I have ordered a 92mm Panaflo 57 cfm fan for the front intake fan (it vudunt huyt).

After all this, my box STILL hangs all the friggin' time! I hung up about 10 times today. It hangs in Internet Explorer if left unattended, it hangs while recording and editing wav files in Cool Edit Pro, it hangs while sitting idle. It just plain hangs up for no apparent reason and it is driving me mad! I really, really don't want to reformat and start all over again.

Oh, one other thing that may be a factor. I use a Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical mouse (with the latest drivers). Could it be the culprit?

I would really appreciate any suggestions.
thanks so much,
Neil

 

[Guest_imported]

Wow! Nspeer's problems are identical to mine. I have an IBM Aptive C9X, 200 Mz, 32 Mb. This machine ran for 5 years with maybe 2 or 3 crashes. In February 2002 I installed MSN Messenger and from that very day it has never been the same. It hangs when working, it hangs when idle, it hangs 10 times a day. Both Microsoft and IBM deny the problem exists because I still run Windows 95 and they don't support it anymore. This PC has always done it's job fine, running some WP and financial applications for my business, but now it's a piece of crap.

One thing odd is what happens when I reboot. I must do this using the power switch. When it restarts it often hangs again just as the background image is loading. Then I must reboot again. The second time it starts in 16 colour mode, with HUGE icons. Then it tells me that my display adapter or something is not compatible with my hardware, and I must reboot. So it's boot time again. This process repeats 3 or 4 times until it finally boots normally. Then it hangs again an hour or so later. It's a real hassle.