Unstable system - Xp Pro

seamus

Right, recently the machine has strted going a bit wonky. Windows not appearing properly, menus not showing themselves until I actually hover the mouse over them. The mouse is going a bit weird, and MS Office tries to open up documents twice when you click on them.

Yes, I have recently installed a lot of software, including Office 97....

If it was Windows 98, I'd format & reinstall by now
Is there any kind of OS integrity checkers built in to XP? It may have something to do with the startup too. Programs I've removed from startup (such as netscape) keep loading themselves anyway, even when I've asked them not to
Scandisk turns up fine. AVG and Adaware come out clean.

ColmOT [MSFT]

Hi Seamus - there are a lot of things that might be causing these symptoms.

First of all, if I was you I'd remove all the softwar ethat you don't use.
Secondly, I'd check if you have th emost up to date drivers for your devides, especially your display drivers.

Make sure that you defrag (run defrag c: -v from the command prompt) your machine regularly.

As far as an inbuilt integrity checker, ther eis the System File Checker, sfc.exe /scannow, that will check your core system files and make sure that they are up to date.

On Windows Update, there are some application compatability patches that make legacy applications, such as Office 97, 'more' compatable with Windows XP.

Hope that some of these help,

Colm.

seamus

Cheers Colm, I'll give sfc and update a look

OfflerCrocGod

For Icon problems you can also try TweakUI and rebuild your icons using it, but I'd say that wont fix your other probs. For Startup always use msconfig ( msconfig in the run box ) and see what it says about your start-up stuff.