Desktop icons disappear, and reappear

[Old Navy Vet]

Hello Group,
____
First off, while looking through here for something related to my question,
I saw one of Kelly's posts, and found out about Alex Nichol :-(
I hadn't been looking in the group for a while, and hadn't heard until now.
He answered a number of my questions over the past years, and I am very sad
now to hear this. He will surely be missed, he was a good man.
Funny, how you can feel like you knew someone, and consider them a friend,
when your only contact with them, has been in a newsgroup, on the internet.
RIP Alex, I will remember you my friend...
____

My question, is, occasionaly all the icons on my desktop will disappear, and
within a few seconds will all reappear. This seems to happen randomly, after
either double-clicking a file on my desktop, such as a .jpg or a .txt file,
or even a folder like My Documents or My Computer, and it also does it
sometimes when I go to open Windows Explorer. Whether it was a file, a
folder, or Windows Explorer that I go to open, they never do open, there's a
second or two delay, then the icons do their disappearing act, then decide
to return. That's about as good as I can explain it. Besides this, no other
problems.

What gets me is, just barely two weeks ago, it was time to clean this
machine up, and do a reinstall, not because anything was wrong, it had just
acumulated a lot of junk. (The desktop icons were not doing their
disappearing act then).
So I saved what I needed to, and formatted and reinstalled. It's been doing
it occasionaly, since the third day after I reinstalled.
My XP disk is from before XP SP1, and I installed XP SP1 shortly after the
reinstall (the next day). With all the hub ub about XP SP2, I haven't
summoned up the nerve to try it yet.

Any help appreciated, Thank you

 

[Malke]

My question, is, occasionaly all the icons on my desktop will
disappear, and within a few seconds will all reappear. This seems to
happen randomly, after either double-clicking a file on my desktop,
such as a .jpg or a .txt file, or even a folder like My Documents or
My Computer, and it also does it sometimes when I go to open Windows
Explorer. Whether it was a file, a folder, or Windows Explorer that I
go to open, they never do open, there's a second or two delay, then
the icons do their disappearing act, then decide to return. That's
about as good as I can explain it. Besides this, no other problems.

What gets me is, just barely two weeks ago, it was time to clean this
machine up, and do a reinstall, not because anything was wrong, it had
just acumulated a lot of junk. (The desktop icons were not doing their
disappearing act then).
So I saved what I needed to, and formatted and reinstalled. It's been
doing it occasionaly, since the third day after I reinstalled.
My XP disk is from before XP SP1, and I installed XP SP1 shortly after
the
reinstall (the next day). With all the hub ub about XP SP2, I
haven't summoned up the nerve to try it yet.

Did you remember to install updated drivers for your video card? Get
them from the device mftr.'s website or from the OEM's website if you
have an OEM machine (HP, Sony, Dell, etc.).

Malke

 

[R. McCarty]

If I can add a suggestion or two.
One if this is a fresh install, did you install the Chipset driver package
for your motherboard ? This applies more to VIA based chipsets,but
Intel should also be updated. Also, after you install the latest video
drivers you might want to ensure that your Monitor definition is for a
specific vendor/model and not using the catch-all "Plug-&-Play".After
the monitor is correctly defined set the Refresh rate to something that
is higher than the 60Hz default value.
This could also be a problem with the Windows Shell re-starting &
that causes the screen to rebuild/refresh like you describe.
Service Pack would be a benefit - Do you have the capability to make
a System Partition image on the work you've already done ?