Strange Text in explorer related applet????

[Barry Brindisi]

Here is the scoop:

1. Have XP Home with SP1 installed on PC, for more than a
year. Had a CRT monitor hooked up to the system and used
a Diamond Stealth (16MB) video card with S3 Graphic's
Savage 4 driver. The card was purchased in 2000. The
system worked fine and have DirectX 9.0b.

2. Recently got a Flat Screen LCD monitor. The monitor
worked great with a new laptop using an onboard ATI RAID
video (64MB). There was NO evidence of strange appearing
text or rather text that appear to be chopped in half.

3. Now, I am using the LCD monitor with the desktop unit.
I soon began to see some strange looking texts appearing
in certain documents. I don't see it occuring in
Netscape when viewing web pages or Adobe Acrobats. Yet,
when I run IE 6.x (latest version), I'll see disappeared
text in the address bar. Or, my e-book library that makes
use of expler will have text on top of each other. In
msconfig, some of the checkboxes are invisible until I
select a half visible or visible text. Yes, I've seen a
similar problem in Word XP.

What is going on here?

By the way, text in games like GalCiv, Civ III and on the
desktop, the icon titles are fine. So are the text on the
taskbar.

Did I try uninstalling the video driver and going into
Safe Mode? Yes, the text appeared as it should when in
normal Safe Mode. I uninstalled the video driver for the
video card, some time ago. Then went back into XP normal
and XP installed the video driver. This was about 2 weeks
ago.

Now, I am BAAACK!!!! Back to where I started from. I
hope MS tech are reading this and come up with a solution.

For now, I am wondering if re-installing XP Home will fix
this annoying problem?

Available tools:
Norton Ghost 2002
Extra 80GB hard drive.
DSL connection.

My copy of XP is on a 40GB disk and only using about 15GB
of space. The copy of Home I have is an upgrade version
and not the FULL one. That version is a part of my
Laptop's Recovery disk set. FYI, the laptop is HP
Pavillion and the desktop is non commercial.

The processor for desktop is AMD 1GHz and have 512MB of
RAM.

Please let me know what can be done? Thanks in advance.

 

[Barry Brindisi]

Ok, I thought that I'd get a second opinion, as it
wer. Though I did check out my system with NAV 2004, I
went to Trend's Houscall's web site and did a scan from
their server. I am glad to say that my system is NOT
contaminated. At least that possibility is totally
removed.

Any ideas as to what is causing the below problems?

 

[Barry Brindisi]

I have two screenshots showing what I am talking about. Can these be
posted Here? I am thinking that it would go a long way in explaining
things. If not, then where? I'll just refer you to there.

 

[Barry Brindisi]

The screen shots (both #1 & #2) can be found under
microsoft.public.pocketpc.binaries newsgroup in the post - Strange Text
screenshots 1 & 2. Hope this helps.

 

[Barry Brindisi]

I was hoping to avoid the very obvious, "It's the video driver!"
business since it means going out and buying a new video card. As it
is, I was happy with the current card. I've also had confirmation that
S3 Graphics not only stopped supporting the driver but won't make any
updates for it. I have the latest.

Now, the hunt begins for a new video card. Was planning on this but not
so quickly. BTW, I did uninstall the video driver in Safe Mode and
reinstall it. Hopefully, that strange effects on the text won't be back
for a few weeks.