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Problems with Alt-Tab task switcher


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When I hold down Alt and press and release Tab, the small list of icons flashes up briefly in the centre of the screen but then disappears (instead of remaining visible), with the result that I can't tab through the various open windows on my system. The same behaviour can be observed when using an application like Visual Studio that makes use of Ctrl Tab for looping through open documents -- the list of icons appears fleetingly and then goes again. Even some tool-tips are affected; e.g., when debugging in Visual Studio and hovering over a variable to see its contents, I now find that the mini pop-up window flicks off almost immediately.

This has just started happening (at about 11pm last night), without my having changed anything at all; when I stopped for dinner it was all fine and when I came back an hour later (having left the machine on), it had gone wrong. The change has survived numerous reboots and seems permanent; given the widespread effects I've described, I'm wondering whether some low-level systems file has been compromised somehow. This actually happened to me at the end of last year, when I ended up reinstalling the OS, which is 64-bit Windows Server 2003. (Why I am using a server platform for development is a good question -- I am building web-sites and it is handy to be able to have a powerful web-server available locally.)

All answers, links and other messages of support very gratefully received!

Ed Graham

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Thanks for the reply, Pat; I haven't got the option of a System Restore, sadly. My best guess is that a process is refreshing the screen somehow, as tool-tips and other fly-outs are also disappearing after a split second. I have tried rebooting after disabling all non-essential services (and start-up programs) but the problem still remains.

Cheers,

Ed

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Does this happen in Safe Mode?

You mention using server OS because it has a powerful web-server. You may be interested in http://www.apache.org/ which is quite customizable and will run on a very low end computer with or without a server OS, including Windows and *nix.

FYI - System Restore is not available in Windows 2003 Server Family.

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