Notepad weirdness ... SOLVED !

[Jeff the Brit]

Anyone seen this ? Notepad doesn't refresh the display properly when scrolling. As the display scrolls up or down, characters are overlaid on top of existing text. If the window is resized in any direction, but NOT if dragged and dropped, the display returns to normal. This doesn't happen in Wordpad, even when using the vgasys font, but does happen when using sysedit, which is only Notepad in disguise.

Machine spec:
AMD K6-2 350 MHz, 128 Mb PC100 SDRAM
Chaintech 5 AGM2 mobo
Intel Pro NIC, Terayon cable modem
20Gb Samsung HDD
AWE64 sound card
Banshee 16 Mb PCI

Win95b, DirectX 8.0a, IE 5.5
All hardware drivers current, including Via 4 in 1

Virus scan shows clean ( F-Prot with current signatures). Everything else appears to be working normally. I don't know if the problem was present before I installed the 20 Gb drive, but the drive swap went fine.

[Milenko]

I had a 16 mb banshee for a couple years and never had a prob like this, so I don't think that's it. Have you tried using system file checker to re-extract notepad.exe? Possible its corrupted or there's a remnent of a virus somewhere in there.

[Damned Angel]

I actually had the same problem with my 16mb banshee after I installed WinME. Just installing 3dfx refrence drivers seemed to solve it for me.

[Mr_Miyagi]

its nearly always video driver probs.. get the latest, and that should sort it.

unless, you have a virus of some sort? (remember the old falling letters virus?)

OR
the font file is corrupted, try using a different font????

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[Jeff the Brit]

Thanks to all of you who replied ! After a bit of experimenting, it turned out to be the display set at 32 bit colour that was the cause of the problem. Dropping to 16 or 24 bit solved it. I'd already tried extracting fresh copies of Notepad and the vgasys font without curing the problem. It was also causing problems (I found out later) booting into Windows, often hanging just before the GUI loads.
Another nugget of info to squirrel away for future reference !

[Higg]

I've have seen this occuring when using a remote control tool... if the color settings aren't appropriate... (so that's a bit similar)