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Every once in a while the right click menu is leaving around one of its items:

alt text

This bar sits on top of everything and the only way I can find to make them go away is to change something in the screen setting (e.i. move the alignment of my monitors a few pixels) to force a full redraw. This just started a week or so ago and I've made no hardware updates and /I/ didn't do anything with driver settings or the like.

Any ideas what might have changed or how to make it go away?

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  • 1
    Could you give this a better title?
    – MJeffryes
    Jul 17, 2009 at 19:55

6 Answers 6

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If Microsoft don't know about this, then they haven't used Windows. This happens every so often with me - and a lot of other users.

It imagine that it is either:

  • A fundamental bug in their windowing/graphics systems,
  • too small to worry about, or
  • it is caused by some third party program or driver

I personally think it is either option one or two, but the point is Microsoft haven't fixed it. You could try updating your graphics drivers or seeing if any patches have been issued on Windows Update, but I don't think it'll have much impact.

I'm not sure about the state of play on Vista or 7, as there was a major renovation of the windowing system, and Aero works differently.

Also, for me (XP Pro and part of a domain), bringing up the "Windows Security" dialog (Ctrl+Alt+Del) usually clears any floating things.

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  • On this system it's about once every 10 minutes.
    – BCS
    Jul 17, 2009 at 19:03
  • that's pretty often, I get it, but perhaps 4 times a week
    – Nathan Koop
    Jul 17, 2009 at 20:00
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I believe it has something to do with GDI+ and how XP draws things directly to the screen. You might have noticed this when you can drag a window around and it leaves copies all over the place. In Vista and Windows 7, the Desktop Windows Manager handles those draw requests and is much less prone to that sort of behavior.

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I've noticed this before once or twice on older NVIDIA graphics cards and in Virtual Machines. I do believe this to be a graphics card problem and it is extremely hard to replicate.

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  • IIRC I'm running a ATI card and it's not at all hard to reproduce right now :b
    – BCS
    Jul 17, 2009 at 19:04
  • Funny enough I've never had the problem with an ATI card. I dropped NVIDIA a while back, with exception to the Apple machines I work on.
    – BinaryMisfit
    Jul 17, 2009 at 19:10
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It is a common bug and I've had it happen to me back in Win2k as well. Must have snuck into the kernel somewhere back then.

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All versions of Windows have had this or a similar problem for almost as long as I can remember. It happens in Vista too.

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Try turning down your Hardware Acceleration in the Display Properties Settings/Advanced. If that makes a difference, it's probably due to driver bugs.

In their quest to have the best benchmark times, the drivers are very aggressive at removing drawing requests that they think are redundant. Sometimes they get it wrong.

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