[RESOLVED] Help!! Blinking Start menu!!!!

[Jungi]

Hi all.

I have a Dell PII 350 with 128 MB RAM, Diamond Viper v550 AGP video card, Turtle Beach Montego sound card, Toshiba DVD drive, and an HP cd writer. The Viper card is using the latest detonator drivers. The system came with Windows 95, but I did a fresh install of Windows 98 and installed the Service Pack 1 from Microsoft.
Here's my problem: after installing IE 5.0, I noticed that after launching IE 5.0, the location bar, the start menu, and the shortcut icons next to the start menu start to blink rapidly. It gets to the point where I can't access any of the submenus in the Start menu. Plus, it's rather annoying. It's almost as if the screen keeps trying to refresh- but only in those areas. Also, the start menu and the shorcut icons blink in MS Word as well as Quicken. Also, the blinking is intermittent, but happens frequently. I'm thinking that it might be somehow related to the operating system, but I'm not really sure.
Netscape works fine, games work fine (half-life, mechwarrior 3, etc.), and other programs I've tried (Eudora) work fine as well.

Does anybody have any ideas as to what may be going on? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Jason Oak
[email protected]

P.S. If you need any more info on my system, just ask. Thanks again!

[pcshark]

How current are your DirectX drivers?

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

[Jungi]

PCShark,

I have the (I think) latest DirectX drivers- version 6.1 and according to the DirectX Diagnostics Tool, everything's working ok.

Thanks

Jason

[pcshark]

Have you tried uninstalling IE5 to see if the problem goes away?

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

[Darren Wilson]

try downloading the latest drivers for the Diamond ( not the reference drivers as even my V550 doesn't really like them ) from http://www.diamondmm.com . I experienced flashing effects when using the reference drivers in OpenGL apps which went away when the Diamond 255rev drivers where installed.

Give this a try

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why are our jobs so interesting??????
visit me @ http://www.ace-computers.co.uk

[Jungi]

Uninstalling IE 5 (and recovering IE 4) didn't seem to help the blinking.

I had the diamond drivers before, but installed the reference drivers because 3D Mark 99 Max gave me better benchmark results with the reference drivers (3100=average) vs. the diamond drivers (2900= below average). Have you noticed this too?
Also, you mentioned that you had problems with OpenGL programs, but why would that be relevant to the Start menu and the programs that I mentioned? (IE, Word97, Quicken)
Thanks.

Jason

[Jungi]

OK.
I tried reinstalling the Diamond drivers. The first step in doing so is to change the video adapter to "Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA)" and reboot. After reboot (but before installing the diamond drivers) I tried opening IE, word, and quicken- same thing! So, maybe it's not due to the video card drivers??

Also, I've refined the symptoms of the problem: It seems that there is no problem unless I try to change from the application (IE4, word, quicken) to the taskbar and back. For example, if I have IE4 open, everything seems to work fine, but once I try to click anywhere on the task bar, that's when the address bar, quick launch menu, and start menu begin to blink a few (5-8)times. Then it subsides and everything's ok. I can navigate the start menu without a hitch. If I click back on IE, it happens again and then goes away. And so on.

Also, I've noticed that with Word 97, the cursor also turns into an hourglass, as if it's busy or something.

One more note: in Quicken, the whole application screen tends to blink.

Hope this helps clarify the problem. And thanks so much for the attention you guys have given so far- I really appreciate it.

Jason

[MuscleMan]

You aren't doing something stupid like overclocking your videocard are you? I have seen instances where that will cause errors like that.

[Jungi]

Nope. No overclocking done (cpu or video card or anything). No modifications either. Plus, would overclocking only affect those specific areas anyways? Thanks for the input though.

Jason