"Blinking" Desktop Icons!?

[Stippy420]

Ok, I have a few XP (SP2) systems here that all have the same problem. "Blinking" desktop icons and explorer.exe pegging. (70-90% of CPU).

A few of the icons blink in and out, but ALL of the shortcuts' little arrows blink on and off about 1-2x a second.

I have checked for spyware and anti-virus files/definitions are current. Used TweakUI to rebuild the icons and to remove/re-add the shorcut arrows. The video drivers are up to date. Added the "Max Cached Icons" registry entry too. Nothing seems to help. It doesn't happen all the time, just most of the time.

Since this is happening on new and old machines, Dell and "home-made", I don't think it's a hardware issue.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Blazeix]

My friend had a problem like this, and in turned out to be some bad cables. I know you said you don't think it is a hardware problem, but are you using cables from the same source for both computers?

Just a little more info. What type of video card(s) do you have? What antivirus and antispyware scanners did you use? Its normally best to use more than one antispyware program, since many of them catch different things.

[Stippy420]

Originally Posted by Blazeix

My friend had a problem like this, and in turned out to be some bad cables. I know you said you don't think it is a hardware problem, but are you using cables from the same source for both computers?

Just a little more info. What type of video card(s) do you have? What antivirus and antispyware scanners did you use? Its normally best to use more than one antispyware program, since many of them catch different things.

These are 3 totally separate and complete PCs. Each have Nvidia video cards (4600, 6800GT and a 7800). Some of these machines have been in use for years, others are less than 2 months old and they are used for different things. Same OS, but different programs, tools, "accessories", etc.

I'm running Norton Anti-Virus (v.10 - Checks for spyware as well) on all of them as well as Microsoft's Anti-Spyware program. (Seems to work pretty well)

The "blinking" is like the desktop icons are being constantly refreshed, affecting mainly the shortcuts, especially the little arrows. This pushes the explorer.exe process up to at least 70%. Sometimes it stops, then starts up again after a little while.

[Blazeix]

Download Spybot Search and Destroy. It catches a lot of stuff the norton and MS programs don't catch.

[sblash]

I'm having the same problem & I've used almost all antivirus, torjan, spyware software "didn't find any thing' but no help