Departed

(Sorry about the delay, was out working) That was really bizarre.. I uninstalled my sound drivers (Realtek AC'97 intigrated audio) and without even rebooting to fully uninstall them, everything opened up again. Posting back after I restart, going to clean my registry and reinstall them again. If the problem persists, an e-mail is going to Realtek. Edit: Okay.. after rebooting, everything is back to being screwed up. Now this is really iffy..

Running stock Vista is, well, obviously horrid, and going through the time to turn off/disable/delete the things I removed with vLite isn't effecient whatsoever (nor does everything get removed as deepy as with vLite), but I guess I'll do it again in a week or two if I can't find a solution to this problem. I might try just one more vLite, without intigrating drivers or any unattended option and with Window's intigrated drivers (minus printers and modems). I'll try to uninstall my drivers, see if the problem goes away. Also now that you mentioned it, it could very well be one of the drivers, as the problem does not exist in safe mode. Thanks for looking into it, Nuhi. Great program even in a beta state, just my conflicting nature (or drivers) causing problems. D:

Have been using Vista Ultimate x64 since Beta 2, went through upgrades to RC1, RC2 and finally RTM. I am NOT a person who reformats constantly, I loathe reformatting as I can't even think of going through all the manual tweaks and customizations I do. I do not make images of my drive with software like Norton Ghost, I only manually backup files. With that aside.. vLited my Vista (retail, not RTM, still Ultimate x64), and have ONLY had this problem on the vLited version. If I had any idea what was causing it, I would've fixed it, but I don't. I tried to search for similar issues but either they weren't resolved, caused by viruses and such, or I tried them and they didn't work. Using the Classic start menu for reference. Control Panel (Start Menu and Computer shortcuts) doesn't open, Network and Sharing center (network icon in notification area) doesn't open, Properties (right clicking on Network) doesn't open, Properties (right clicking on Computer) doesn't open, Personalize (right clicking desktop) doesn't open. O&O Defrag opens 50% of the time. Windows Update (start menu shortcut) doesn't open. Right clicking on Folders/Files and selecting Properties takes 10 seconds to open. Using the 3D 'switch between programs' thing with the quicklaunch shortcut causes it to hang for 10 seconds and then open the normal alt+tab switch. Using the Windows key + tab shortcut causes it to hang and not open at all. Opening an image in Windows Photo Gallery takes 10 seconds to open. As I said, I know for a fact that this is due to my vLited install, though I have no clue as to why. I went over my prior vLite'd install, as it happened on the first restart after installation was fully finished and removed less of what I first removed. It worked just fine, multiple reboots, ended up customizing my install back to the way I had to before I refomatted for the first time. I'll be updating the post with more things I find, and I've also attached my vLite Preset file for diagnostic if anyone cares to check it out. If anyone could help, that would obviously be wonderful, and I'd be grateful to have this problem resolved WITHOUT reformatting for the 6th time. For more clarification, I have a 5 year old Windows XP installation I've used until I got the first beta of Vista, played around with it for a bit, but still used my XP installation. When my XP install died due to.. overclocking (*cough*) I actively used Vista ever since. That 180GB of data is still sitting there (though, or course, I backed up and deleted as much as I could to make room for more and more, and also backing up of my current Vista partition before reformatting that for the first time). I also recently used Vista's disk management to make a 3GB partition and install stock XP on it to use partitioning software to extend my 30GB Vista partition to 85GB by shifting free space from my storage (dead xp) partition to the Vista one. So, summed up, I have a dead XP, then active Vista, then active XP, on 3 partitions, respectively. vLite.ini

No one knows? D: I guess I'll resort to failing google searches again.

Had this problem when I overclocked my 7800GS. Screen looked very much like yours, but not that bad. If you're overclocking, obviously go back to stock speeds and see if it still occurs. If you're not overclocking, and since overheating was ruled out, then the card may indeed be dying. But there's still things you can try if you haven't. Update DX9 in Vista, as unless you have a DX10 card and a DX10 programmed game, you will only be using Vista's DX9. DirectX9.0c Web Installer nVidia's new installers fully remove the older versions of the drivers, so the driver cleaning program is obsolete now. If the problem still persists hit ctrl+shift+esc to open Task Manager, go to the Services tab and stop the "Desktop Window Session Manager" and "Themes" services. Load up the game and see if you still get artifacts. If so, revert what you did. Can't really think of anything else other than running a full Disk Check (chkdsk), which probably won't do anything, and dusting out your entire PC if you haven't already, while checking all the connections. Also it wouldn't hurt to try the beta drivers released to fix an SLI bug, even if you don't use SLI. Hopefully this helps you, in some way.

Bumping an old topic, as I'd like to know how also. Pardon if it's already been covered, been trying to search for it but having no luck. Performance gain would be nice, but it's not what I'm after. The files stay locked on my drive, some unable to be defragmented, or moved at all for that matter, and it's really impeding my defragmentation routine which is too long to bother explaining, so pardon my bluntness.

That means i should disable "SuperFetch"? for a performance boost... Disabling Superfetch will NOT net you a performance boost, only the opposite. Superfetch rides on the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" saying. When your PC has nothing to load and run, Superfetch starts loading things into memory so programs sit in RAM Cache waiting for you to launch them, hence a boost to Application launch speed. If a program needs more RAM to function, Superfetch instantly releases what's loaded into Cache. For a scenario... Say you startup your computer and when you get to the desktop you decide you're going to defrag. At that time Superfetch is caching things until your RAM is almost full. You startup your defragmenter, start to defrag. Superfetch only cached 800MB of information out of 2GB total (minus what windows and programs are already using, hence roughly 1.6GB) and it still has more to cache. Superfetch sees that something is going on within windows and INSTANTLY stops caching data, and gives up any RAM it's using if your defragmentation task needs more. So like I said, there is no performance degradation due to Superfetch, only the opposite. I personally let my PC sit there watching Superfetch cache things so all of my programs start faster, which generally takes about 2 minutes. And yes, I am a tweaky performance freak. Superfetch helps me, and I appreciate it. Test it yourself. When you get to your desktop after starting up, open Task Manager and go to the Performance tab. Look down below at the "Physical Memory (MB)" section (see attached screenshot to see what I mean). Total and Free are self explanitory. Cached is what Superfetch has loaded into RAM. When you hear your drive grinding away focus on the 'Cached' and 'Free' sections. You'll see the 'Cached' section fill up while the 'Free' section decreases, that lets you know Superfetch is doing its job. (To the OP) If that isn't happening, and you have nothing under the 'Startup' tab of msconfig checked, then something is awry with your Windows, that's all I can assume. (If I misunderstood the post, then by all means ignore me.)