Okay, to eliminate the variables, I shut everything down from Taskmanager. Then I called up the layout and I still had the problem. So, it does not appear to be related to anything else running. The only thing I had running at the time was;
Explorer.exe
alg.exe
dopus.exe
spoolsv.exe
svchost (multiple instances)
lsass
csrss
winlogin
smss
services
These are all essential Win processes.
It doesn't appear to be hardware related either because I tried it on two different computers. One is a laptop with a Radeon IGP graphics adaptor and the other is a desktop with a Radeon X300 PCI Express graphics adaptor.
The laptop, which is my main computer, has been running flawlessly for over 2 years with many different programs. I have never seen this behavior before with any other app on this machine. I only recently put a copy on my wife's desktop to see it would do the same there. It does.
No, I haven't. The HP drivers listed on their site are the same as when I bought the laptop. I did try later 3rd party drivers but they didn't work so I went back to the tried and true original drivers. ATI does not support drivers for laptops; those have to come from the manufacturer (HP). My wife's desktop have the latest Radeon Catalyst drivers. So, a mix of old and new.
I have to reiterate that in the 2.5 years I've had this laptop, I have never had any graphics related problems. The same can be said of the desktop, which is home built and about 8 months old.
I am curious to find out if Steje has a Radeon graphics card.
I really don't think it's because of a graphics card... as I mentioend. If I blow away my reg data under Directory Opus, I can't reproduce the problem. After re-importing my last DPS settings, I instantly reproduce the problem after saving a new default lister in either list or thumbs. I'll submit a report and work with GPSoft.
Ed... by any chance do you swap DPS settings exports in between 2 different machines sometimes? I have a VM image that I do this to sometimes in order to troubelshoot problems with beta issues and forums issues and take my normal 'polluted' system out of the picture. I wonder if this might have anythign to do with it
No, I don't export settings. I only loaded it on the other machine to see if the problem was my hardware. It isn't. I pulled it off again today because it wasn't a legal copy for the second machine.
By any chance do you have a keyboard that displays message on the screen when you adjust your volume, press caps-lock, etc.
I'm talking about the overlay text that comes with many keyboards, graphics cards support software etc. You press a key sequence, and bright green overlay text appears.
I find that this will cause text in some applications to get smudged or even disappear until the screen is re-painted. (minimize and maximize usually gets back the image of the text).
I've tried this on multiple PCs running clean installs of Windows (and a minimum of typical corporate apps). In all cases this problem appears in my earlier example using tab layouts. I'm not using WindowsBlinds or any of that nonsense (takes up too much memory in my expierence).
