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Ok so here is my desktop, spent about a week trying to figure out how i wanted it to be, then a day (12 hours or so) working on the design and implementation of it. Also the background image changes once an hour (on a timer), but no matter what because the side bars are transparent it always looks good. Of course it's all XPized too. Screeny

Had an idea, but cant seem to find ANY information on it anywhere. With so many people using applications like desktop sidebar, or smartbarxp - which are both great programs, it suddenly struck me, for some people who want to make desktop sidebar into something like the original task bar, with a start button and programs list etc, but also all the other nice added features. Why not just use the original taskbar that comes with windows, and create active toolbars for it (like windows media player, or zonealarm can have stuff in there). If they can do it, it must be possible, to add system monitoring, weather reports, longhorn style clocks, or any other active content. Dunno if I'm searching in google wrongly, but searching for "XP Taskbar Toolbars" or "XP active toolbars" etc etc, seems to yield no results. Is there any reason no one has ever made any decent toolbars?

Mostly use the broadband profile, have changed to all the different profiles etc, and the display settings, doesnt seem to make much difference to it all...

Yep, get the same problem with any graphics, although sometimes it wont connect at all, and takes several times. Haven't tried the other way round, could try that, but my next port of call is to plug in another network card and see if it's the onboard network causing problems.

Ok i have managed to use another computer connected directly to the computer in question (hence eliminating both the router and internet connection). The problem still occurs using the LAN, and with or without windows firewall.

Hiya, I'm having trouble connecting to my home computer via remote desktop, and it's a very strange problem I'm having - I have a router with TCP port 3389 forwarded to my home computer correctly. Also have the Windows XP SP2 firewall turned on, for my lan connection, with remote desktop allowed through as an exception. Also have firewall logging turned on and cant find any dropped packets in the log. I can connect and stay connected for long periods of time, however when trying to display large amounts of graphical data over the remote desktop connection the connection seems to drop. For example if i'm browsing a website remotely, and one with mostly graphical images (rather than text) causes a pause then a disconnection. This also happens when trying to browse photos or anything else like that. This can happen straight away if i've left my home computer displaying an image like that when trying to connect to it - or i can stay connected for hours on end and then look at something like that before being disconnected. The strange thing being, that these things dont make any difference to anything when using the computer locally, all graphics work fine, the network works at very fast speeds internally, and there doesnt seem to be a problem connecting to the internet and browsing webpages locally either - infact if it wasnt for the remote desktop problems I would say my computer works perfectly. I have tried and tried to find the cause of this, the firewall logs simply state the connection as being closed, and nothing more. I have looked over many websites for remote desktop problems, and can't find anything explaining this issue. Could someone please help me??

Not sure as of yet, am yet to see any advantages to running it over XP pro SP2. Although i'm normally one to experiment with new technologies, so might give it a go and see what it's like. From what i've read in articles, it offers a file system which supports faster file searching? Well i'm sorry, i search for a file on average about once a month. I know my hard disks like the back of my hand so i rarely need to go searching for stuff. Umm what else have I seen? rotating windows i think i saw? Well what on earth do you need to rotate a window for? Agree with a previous post, why have the OS eating up all your resources? Even though i will upgrade to hardware capable of running it with the best performance, i still dont want the OS doing all that, XP runs great, runs all forseeable hardware for the time being, and will do it much faster than longhorn. It also plays all games, and very well at that, it runs all media i'm interested in doing, and also has decent themes and customisability. I have normally always upgraded an operating system, but this time it seems all Microsoft are really interested in, is spurring us to spend more money on hardware that's not necessary, and improving/slowing down the asthetics of the operating system. If I'm wrong, then someone please post an actual advantage to this upgrade? Other than curiosity.

Same problem here on my laptop, but not on my home computer, both of which use SiS mobo's, and ATI graphics cards etc... dunno what's causing it.

Hehe yeah i know

It's funny actually you guys are saying not to do this, but that wasnt all I was going to do, I was thinking of adding a hardware firewall and having those 2 software firewalls running lol

5.1 was changed to work with SP2, if u look in their release history...

oh yeah i know that i'd have to create the same rules twice over, although i dont really have any rules atm, all i'm doing is letting one port through, and i think that's about it, and that's for remote desktop, which works automatically through the windows firewall anyway. There's certain sites that are blocked (for p2p stuff etc), in ZA, but u cant do that in windows firewall anyway. I just figured using the windows firewall things will get to that first and be blocked out by it, anything that happens to fall through that, can be hit by the ZA firewall after that

Hey, Just had an idea, of running both the new XP SP2 firewall, and Zone Alarm Security Suite (5.1) at the same time, seems to work ok, not noticed any problems - thought it'd be a good idea as every software has bugs and holes in it, figured if something can get through one of them, the other firewall should catch it... Or is my thinking completely wrong there? and is this a pointless venture?

Ummm I have winxp with a 200 gig hdd, and i see the full 200 gigs.. dunno where u got 137 gigs from.

Found the problem, for some reason my radeon drivers wouldn't install correctly (no matter how many times I tried), until I installed them manuall, assume there's a bug with the installer and SP2 in that case.

Any idea how to reinstall? I download it, and run the installer and it just says the components are finished and ready to use, without actually doing anything (assuming because it's already installed). Zero hour has the same problem btw, just going to check other games... Dunno why though, as dxdiag tests all work fine.

Cant seem to get C&C generals to work when SP2 is installed. Never had a problem before, but just did a reinstall with SP2, did the dxdiag stuff and installed my graphics drivers, and now the game is saying "Make sure you have DirectX 8.1 or higher" (not the exact message but the jist is there). The game is patched up to 1.7. Anyone else tried playing it?? Just gonna try installing zero hour and see if that works.

The new(ish) Sony SoundForge 7.0a wont run with SP2 either... I get the following: "An error occurred starting Sound Forge.Error 0x8004e 153 (message missing)"

Hrm, yeah just tried running a P2P proggy (shareaza), and it didnt do anything at all! So figured it's that tcp/ip thingy, which I've just slipstreamed into my dvd, gonna reinstall windows with that on my laptop in a min (after it's finished burning), and will update you to if it solves the issue or not

I think I still have a copy of DOS 3.33 lieing around somewhere, dont use it of course, I'm using XP pro