I hope someone can help me with a problem that I am having with my taskbar icons and windows itself. It seems that everytime I transfer, or sometimes just open and close my secondary hard drive's window, windows XP blinks and within a few seconds half of my taskbar icons disappear. Does anyone know if this is a drive issue or windows issue. I have tried formatting both of the drives which evenually resulted in the same problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
P.S, sometimes my zonealarm tells me that Dr.watson wants to turn on, when i allow it freezes the computer, when I dont I am able to continue working on it but with less icons and sometimes the shut down and restart options in windows do not work after the occurence of this problem
Hi,
If you right-click 'Start' button, select Properties > Start Menu > Customize > Advanced, on the scrollable list of Start Menu items, make sure 'Administrative Tools' is displayed.
From administrative tools, you can select 'Event Viewer'.
In the Application folder of Event Viewer, you can see exactly what is happening or has happened with your PC.
You will find that your 'explorer.exe' is stopping unexpectedly, and being restarted. This is not good.
Run Tools > Error Checking on your drives, especially if NTFS. You will probably have to reboot to accomplish this. Do it at least once/month.
Clean out your Startup Folder. Purchase more RAM. Empty both your Temp directories and your recycle bin too, and set your browser cache to 30MB, 40MB tops. Defrag your drives (only AFTER error-check).
Remove all Spyware/Adware/Malware/Trojans/BHOs and other malicious entities from your OS.
Start with Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy.
For real nasty situations, you might require TrojanHunter (30 days) or even HiJack This!
Never met a PC I couldn't disinfect, but sometimes takes a long time (Make sure it's worth it - easier to reinstall Windows).
Your Windows is hurting. But give it a serious tune-up first, and check Event Viewer to make sure everything is okay.
Lotsa people got all hell breakin' loose in Event Viewer, but they are blissfully unaware...
L8R
You were correct in assuming explorer.exe was restarting. It was and still is. It sells that shell was restarted which is explorer. But the problem lies in the fact that I have reinstalled windows a bunch of times and even formatted and reformatted both drives. After a clean install with format, the first thing I do is tranfer information from one drive to another, close the windows, wait a few seconds,and then Dr. Watson pops up on my zonealarm. Then explorer.exe restarts, half of taskbar icons disappear, and the system is stable. NO problems after that. But this is rather annoying. Any more help would be greatly appreciated.
ps. I have kingston 1gb of ram, hopefully this might not be the root of the problem
