phantom application
 

for the last couple of weeks I have had an application tab open in the main (centre) taskbar at the bottom of my screen. Sometimes this tab is an empty grey box, sometimes it says "Screen Saver" in it. If I click on it a few times it goes away. Right clicking it does nothing.

When it appears the machine runs slower than normal but there does not appear to be any permanent damage done. I have not been able to work out what process I use that causes it to appear. I run full Outlook, Firefox, Ad-Aware, AVG and Spybot regularly. The machine is running Win98 SE. CTRL-ALT-DEL does not reveal the application/task running and I have looked at my start up options and they all look normal.

Any ideas?

Andrew.

Right Click a Blank portion of the sceen, Select Properties, then Screen Saver and check what screen saver if any your are using, Suggest to test this select 'None' and click apply and OK and try that setting for a while to see if anything pops up again, also chceck the Themes tab and make sure your using the Windows XP theme.

Just could be you have managed to download or installed a screen saver or theme as part of something else that is trying too alter the way your screen presents to you.

Download a program called "process explorer" it takes the place of the normal cont+alt+del screen and gives you much more info, you should be able to trac down which programme is causing your problem.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx

phantom screen saver
 

If I leave the machine until a screen saver kicks in, it does the 3d text I have selected just fine. The tab in the application bar sometimes says screen saver and sometimes is blank. Screen savers do not normally open tabs.

I have downloaded and installed the process monitor but have not been able to spot the rogue process when it happened just the once today.

Thanks for the help, I'll keep my eye on it.

Andrew.