weird xp gui taskbar problem

[Chrysalis]

I had this problem causing me to reinstall and it is still present, I previously blamed IE7 but IE7 hasnt touched this installation yet.

SFC is disabled so I suspect it could be caused by overwritten system dlls.

Problem.

When a dozen or so windows are open and in the taskbar and I havent selected one for a short time I then click a different window on the taskbar, for example it could be a different internet explorer window, it will then flash a different window quickly on screen before going to the one I selected, I can see on the taskbar its actually quickly selecting a "different" window to the one I clicked on and then quickly going to the one I selected, its fast but not fast enough to delay the process and to not cause a visible disruption. I can visibly see the other window briefly go on top then go away again, I think it even sometimes does more then 1 window cycling 2 or 3 before going to the one I selected.

Has anyone known of this issue and know what the cause might be as I am pulling hairs out over this, I could reinstall windows all over again and it come back again.

[cluberti]

Try changing out your video driver for the "Standard VGA driver" and see if the problems persist. They might, but some of this is video driver-driven, so it's always the place I start with explorer.exe oddities. If that doesn't work, consider shellexview to disable all non-Microsoft explorer hooks (reboot required once all disabled) to see if that resolves it.

[HyperHacker]

It does that to me too. Sometimes when I switch from a maximized window to a normal one, another normal one will also pop up but not take focus. After a few months it just completely loses track of windowing, choosing the wrong windows at random, which is when I reinstall. It doesn't get that bad every time though.

[Chrysalis]

hmm since enabling sfc this has stopped occuring, I did run sfc scannow which restored some files of cd as well but I didnt let it finish since I had too many prompts to insert cd, seems it was restoring some files not installed by media, I have left sfc enabled tho. Windows isnt any slower.

[cluberti]

If the System File Checker was asking for the CD, it was likely trying to checksum some of the files from the media against files on disk. You really should put the CD in (or make a local source and point the registry to the new location) before running SFC - that's a pretty important part to make sure your files are checked properly.