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I've just upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 8 on a Dell Latitude D820, which went fine. But, after installing a new driver for the video card, the Start Screen is not working anymore. As soon the mouse touches a tile, they all disappear and I'm left with only the background image.

I can go to the desktop by hitting Win+D and if I hit the Win key after some minutes the tiles are there again only to disappear as soon the mousepointer touches them.

How do I fix this?

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If it was working with the old driver, you could roll back to it using device manager for the time being – Graham Wager Nov 18 '12 at 20:00
Yes, that would work. However the screen resulotion is something like 1024*640. That's not what I'm realy looking for. – BetaRide Nov 18 '12 at 20:07
Where did you get the driver from? Dell, Windows Update, or the chipset manufacturer? – Rowland Shaw Nov 19 '12 at 8:52
Since I have a 32-bit Win 8, I toke the 32-Bit Vista driver from Dell. The Vista driver is the latest one they offer. – BetaRide Nov 19 '12 at 15:12
The problems are not necessarily driver related. For me the start menu works fine 98% of the time, but broke down couple of times already. I just work on something on the desktop, need to run stuff from the start, so I click Win button and whoa! Background image distorted, tiles missing, sidebar still works, scrollbars are there, but overall it's unusable. Didn't yet find a way to restore it to working condition without a sign out or system restart. Can't wait till I have time to install Windows 7 again, the overall productivity loss on Windows 8 is killing me ... – famousgarkin Feb 23 at 13:45

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It might not work, but have you tried installing the official Nvidia drivers? Unfortunately, it doesn't officially support Nvidia Quadro cards under the 130M. There's a modified inf file that adds the 120M to the "supported" list here under the "INF Modified" link, though of course use it at your own risk (I've used modified INFs, with success, from their site before when Nvidia didn't have a laptop reference driver for my GeForce 330M, but that's not a guarantee it will work). I would download the official Nvidia drivers from Nvidia's website and use the modified INF on those, just to be safe. The official Nvidia driver, at least the GeForce one, just extracts to C:\NVIDIA, and the nvts.inf file is in a Display.Driver folder beneath a bunch of folders. Then I think you can use the setup.exe just above the Display.Driver folder (I'm not sure if the other items it installs will complain, you might want to uncheck them).

I was under the impression that Windows 8, specifically the Start Screen, required new drivers, as in not Vista's drivers. At least, Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2. I was using Nvidia's beta drivers for a while because of it.

If all else fails, you might try uninstalling your graphics driver entirely and use the driver provided by Windows update. This link suggests that Windows Update provides a driver that supports the 120M with Aero support and 2D acceleration.

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That sounds promission. I already tried an nvidia driver with a modified inf file. All I got was a black screen. Since I did not find a way to boot into save mode in win 8 to remove the faulty driver this meant reinstalling everything. – BetaRide Nov 22 '12 at 20:20

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