XP Home desktop "boxed in"

[Guest]

My cousin hit some miscellaneous keys while in Word and it shrunk the XP
desktop area. It looked similar to displaying a desktop background in the
center of the screen with a color border around it, however, the border was
black, and the cursor could not go over the threshold of the desktop
background picture. It was "boxed in." Eventually, we used the System
Restore utility to fix this, and I probably could have uninstalled the video
driver and let plug n' play reinstall it after a reboot. Has anyone else had
this happen before? Is it a bug? I suspect he hit some type of shortcut key
combination - but doing a restore or reinstalling the driver seemed kind of
extreme to me. Thanks.

 

[Harry Ohrn]

This is not a bug. By your own admission it was created by inappropriate key
presses. Using System Restore to fix the problem is not an extreme move.
That's it's purpose - to help you roll back to the latest date that the
system was functioning correctly. It would have been more extreme to start
uninstalling/reinstalling video drivers.

Perhaps your video card uses Hot Key combos to set different display
settings. Check your video card software to see if there is something there.
Or perhaps you have software installed for your monitor that controls it's
settings.