The other way to get the same effet would be to use a while loop and then use ob_flush() to output the stuff at the end continuosly. What do you want to use this for?
On some servers there are ways of accessing a thing where you can use *NIX commands through SSI. You would be able to use these for tasks such as subdomains etc. I'm not sure that any free software is availiable for the job.
http://www.aaabackgrounds.com/ is a good site with loads of free tileable backgrounds on. If you want to make fades u should should try using the GIMP as an excellent free graphics program
If you get really annoyed with it you could manually search and remove everything from you hard drive and the registry(run regedit). Otherwise you could reinstall windows.