For the past three weeks I've been connecting my laptop to an external LCD monitor and have had no problems until last night. As I was shutting down, I noticed on my extended a small blue box. At the time I thought it was some dead pixels or something and decided to sort it out in the morning.
So today, I find the box gone but after I login it reappears. I also my desktops icons missing, that right clicking on the desktop didn't work, some USB devices didn't work (namely USB mouse), control panel wouldn't open, start menu key shortcut wouldn't work, Sophos anti-virus wouldn't open and after clicking shutdown, no dialog appeared to ask if I wanted to logoff, shutdown or restart but programs started exiting anyway and a problem occured during the explorers shutdown. So I turned it off manually, but when it came back everything was okay, but the box was still there. Clicking on it highlights it like an icon would and windows open up OVER it.
A virus scan with Sophos came up clean.
So what could this be? I'm using XP Pro SP2, by the way.
Possibly a worm, or something inside your Windows folder could be corupted... Do you have alot of stuff on this laptop? I think the best thing would be to reinstall windows, since nothing works. Have you tried booting into safe mode?
Not too much, I still have 16GB or so of free space.
I can't reinstall Windows as it is a work laptop and thus I do not have access to the administrator account or have the Windows discs in my possession.
The thing is, the box only appears on my second monitor I have attached at home. If I disconnect it, it doens't jump to the laptop screen. I havn't had an opportunity to try the monitor with another PC yet, so I'm not fully sure where the problem lies.
