Title bar and window surround occasionally vanish in Explorer

[pwc101]

Hello,

I'm working on a Windows XP SP2 machine as a restricted user (I'm not the admin). I have access to two machines, both of which exhibit this bahviour, which led me to think that this might be a known issue and possible resolveable.

I've attached an image of the problem, as that most concisely describes the problem. As you can see, the windows explorer windows (and anything spawned by them - the recycle bin dialogue, for example) do not have any windows background or title bar. The buttons become unresponsive in the dialogue window, and in explorer itself if I open a folder, it does so in a new instance of windows explorer. This has happened a number of times in spite of reboots in between. The only way I have found to restore things to normal is to open up Task Manager and kill explorer.exe and then restart it manually (it does not do so automatically).

Has anyone heard of this or something similar before?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

edit: As you can see, other applications which run independently of explorer.exe work fine (in this case Qinsy on the right hand desktop).

[Speed_Demon]

Looks like a video driver to me. It also could be failing hardware.

I would first look for an updated video driver from the manufacturer. If you aren't the admin I would contact them as well.

[cozofdeath]

That is crazy looking. If its on both machines it could be a hardware problem if there the same setup, malware, or theme software gone corrupt somehow. You could try some of this stuff aside from the trying for updated driver. Running a sfc /scannow. Most of that stuff (gui) is stored in resource files that the system file checker can replace if corrupt. Could be a corrupt registry value which you could be able to fix with a restore from a previous date. Or you can try this. That KB article only describes how to fix the title bar if corrupted but it if it works it will tell you were the problem is. Looking for event errors in event manager could lead somewhere also. Does this happen with every user account?

[pwc101]

Does this happen with every user account?

There's only one user account - the machines are in a lab that is accessible to only a certain number of people, and it makes no sense to have everyone on as admin as we don't really need admin privileges for our work!

Running a sfc /scannow

Unfortunately, I can't run that as it seems it needs admin rights.

I've had a look in the Event Viewer (a very useful app that I'd not come across before!) and found the following:

Event Type:	Error
Event Source:	.NET Runtime
Event Category:	None
Event ID:	0
Date:		27/03/2007
Time:		10:48:59
User:		N/A
Computer:	ID1
Description:
The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( .NET Runtime ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the 
necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able 
to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information 
is part of the event: Unable to open shim database version registry key - v2.0.50727.00000.

I think that was earlier in the day (crash was around 15.00, this is at 11.00), but perhaps it's linked?...

There was also this:

Event Type:	Information
Event Source:	Service Control Manager
Event Category:	None
Event ID:	7035
Date:		26/03/2007
Time:		15:18:26
User:		NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer:	ID1
Description:
The IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service service was successfully sent a start control.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at [url="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp"]http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp[/url].

Which is at the time of the crash... seems strange to me that this would have any impact on the GUI?

Thanks for the input anyway folks,

I'll pass on what you've said to the admin and see what he says.

[cozofdeath]

The first error can be fixed with this hotfix.