Laptop issue

[Tomato]

***I plan on replacing this section of the post with specific information about which laptop I have, as well as screen shots demonstrating the issue once I get home. However currently I'm at a school computer and don't remember the specific model. However, It is an Inspiron model laptop made by Dell, with Windows SP2 on it.***

Over the last few weeks, I've been noticing a bizzare glitch with the monitor of my laptop. Every so often, when I right click on an object and select an option (such as rename, copy, paste, etc.) a semi-transparent shadow of that selection (blue box with white text version of whatever I selected) will get stuck on my monitor, and will stay there until the glitch occurs again and another box gets stuck in another place. Even when the monitor is on screen-saver, it's still there.

Now, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem (I've come to ignore it, for the most part) but it's showing up on my screen-shots as well. It's not large or anything, but when it's positioned so it's right in the middle of my Ctool2 shots, it becomes a bit of an irritation.

This is not to say I'm desperate or anything for this thing to be gone, it's just a bit irritating at the moment, but if it's a sign of something serious I want to catch it early.

[stumpy]

This may be a dead end, and I can't check it right now, but I thought there was a setting for "show shadows under menus/mouse" or maybe "drop shadows" or something that you could play with that affected this. It was in the System widget (that pops up when you right-click on My Computer and choose "Properties"), under the Advanced tab, in Performance Options.

Anyway, other people know more about Windows tweaks than I do, but I thought that was related.

[zuludelta]

Just adding more detail to stumpy's suggestion:

In Windows XP, go to Start--> Control Panel--> Display (if you're using Classic View), or if you're using Category View, you first have to go to "Appearances and Themes" before getting to choose "Display"--> go to the "Appearance" tab--> click on "Effects"--> un-check "show shadows under menus"--> click "OK"

If that doesn't work, try doing the same steps, except un-check the "Use the following transition effects for menus and tooltips" box instead of "show shadows under menus." If that still doesn't work, un-check all the effects and see if that helps.

Also, if you've got a spare monitor, you might want to try hooking up your laptop to see if the problem persists in an extenral monitor (just to eliminate the possibility that it's a hardware problem with your laptop screen).

[Tomato]

Ok, I unchecked both items, and after changing my resolution to a lower one and then back (just to reset the screen) it seems to have gone away. I don't know if it's going to stay gone yet, but for now I'm hopeful. Thanks guys!