Strange display issue with wallpaper

[Tripredacus]

So we got a new drive image in today. It is Windows XP SP2 with IE7. The installed apps are some games, DirectX and Trend Micro client. I had to approve the usage of the image and run a sid change on it. There were no scheduled tasks so that was good. So I ran the sid change, rebooted and checked out the event viewer. All clear, no problems so I approved it and we started dropping the image on a few PCs.

Well this is where things got weird. We run the sid changer on the new PCs and it does something different. And it does this on all (we did 6) of them. After the desktop loads up after the reboot (any reboot/logoff) the wallpaper (bliss) is visible, but maybe 5 seconds after that, the wallpaper disappears and we have a gray background. OK i thought the wallpaper just became broken, so I open up the display properties, and I realise that everything EXCEPT "Color" is unavailable (grayed out) on the Desktop tab. You can click everything else on the other tabs.

I had another guy look at one of the machines and we tried all sorts of stuff. He discovered that the wallpaper actually doesn't get changed, because you can see it if you reboot, or if you kill the explorer.exe process. I even set the IE home page to an htm file, then enabled Active Desktop. What happened was that this gray "background" sits between the wallpaper and the Active Desktop layer.

We also tried the following:

- reinstall the video card drivers

- run a repair install

- boot into Safe Mode

- disable all startup apps with msconfig and set all Trend services to manual

- run the System File Checker, which didn't fix it either but it made Windows BSOD instead.

- add filemon to Run in the registry to capture events at bootup, which ironically led me to find Trend isn't working properly but I'm not concerned with that.

- verified there are no active GPOs applied via GPRESULT and the GPOE.

- verify desktop/shell registry settings

- checked all suspect log and INI files searching for security apps.

- killed 95% of handles and processes with Process Explorer.

OK so if the eval PC did this, i would think it is fine. But it didn't. In fact, we dug out that drive and booted it up to use as reference. I worked on this for maybe 3 hours today, and the other guy worked on it for about an hour. We are just drawing up blanks.

Anyone have an idea about this behaviour?

[Mr Snrub]

...After the desktop loads up after the reboot (any reboot/logoff) the wallpaper (bliss) is visible, but maybe 5 seconds after that, the wallpaper disappears and we have a gray background.

...discovered that the wallpaper actually doesn't get changed, because you can see it if you reboot, or if you kill the explorer.exe process. I even set the IE home page to an htm file, then enabled Active Desktop. What happened was that this gray "background" sits between the wallpaper and the Active Desktop layer.

So it isn't blitzing the setting for the wallpaper or overriding it with a GPO, and if Explorer is killed the wallpaper reappears (or more correctly, the strange grey sheet in front of it is removed).

As soon as explorer.exe is relaunched, the grey screen returns?

Happens at all resolutions and colour depths?

Happens for all users who log on?

Changing the wallpaper has no effect?

What colour is the desktop set to, when no wallpaper is in use?

Take a hang mode ADPlus dump of explorer.exe and upload it somewhere, I can take a look if there is anything quirky going on in the running threads (but it may be something that has "been and gone").

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/deb...ng/default.mspx

ADPlus command line (ideally run after killing & relaunching explorer.exe without opening anything else):

adplus -hang -ctcf -pn explorer.exe -o c:\dumps

[Tripredacus]

...After the desktop loads up after the reboot (any reboot/logoff) the wallpaper (bliss) is visible, but maybe 5 seconds after that, the wallpaper disappears and we have a gray background.

...discovered that the wallpaper actually doesn't get changed, because you can see it if you reboot, or if you kill the explorer.exe process. I even set the IE home page to an htm file, then enabled Active Desktop. What happened was that this gray "background" sits between the wallpaper and the Active Desktop layer.

So it isn't blitzing the setting for the wallpaper or overriding it with a GPO, and if Explorer is killed the wallpaper reappears (or more correctly, the strange grey sheet in front of it is removed).

As soon as explorer.exe is relaunched, the grey screen returns?

Happens at all resolutions and colour depths?

Happens for all users who log on?

Changing the wallpaper has no effect?

What colour is the desktop set to, when no wallpaper is in use?

Take a hang mode ADPlus dump of explorer.exe and upload it somewhere, I can take a look if there is anything quirky going on in the running threads (but it may be something that has "been and gone").

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/deb...ng/default.mspx

ADPlus command line (ideally run after killing & relaunching explorer.exe without opening anything else):

adplus -hang -ctcf -pn explorer.exe -o c:\dumps

I'll get to retest it sometime in the future, just because this is so weird. The image was rebuilt this morning before I came in so we aren't experiencing this issue anymore. For the record, here are your answers:

- The gray screen returns after relaunching explorer.exe.

- This happens at all resolutions and color depths (including when no video drivers are installed)

- You cannot change the wallpaper

- It is possible to change the background color, but the only difference you see is the background color for text under icons.

- Happens for all users. However I was not able to test a limited user. There was only the administrator account, and when I went to make a new account for testing, I could only make another administrator account. The option for creating a limited account was unavailable. Also, this also happened with the Guest account.

I don't know how long it will be before I can test this again, but I did save the image.