Computer Tech: The Mystery Window

Factual Questions
1
      • I have a PC running WIN98SE, and just tonight noticed that after booting up, there is one single gray pixel in the upper-left hand of the screen. The background is the plain green so it is obvious if you look closely, but I never did that before. And I also noticed that if you put the (regular) arrow pointer near it, the cursor changes into an “I”-beam, such as if there was a textbox to type in, but there is not. I have moved around other nearby shortcuts and it’s not part of any of them, and I tried to grab it and that doesn’t work either–and I tried to “click & drag” grab it, no success there either. And after about three attempts, the gray pixel disappears, but the cursor still changes into an “I”-beam there.
  • How can I find out everything that is running on the desktop? It is obvious that the “Desktop” folder does not show everything–system icons aren’t included there. I have an antivirus program and spybot s & d/adaware and run them now and then, I have no reason to suspect it’s any kind of malicious program but now I’m darned curious. If I change the desktop resolution, it expands or contracts from the upper-left hand corner, I can tell by the arrangement of the desktop icons when I switch from a lower-resolution to a higher one (all the icons are shifted up+left).
    Any ideas?
    ~
2

Right-click the desktop and hit Arrange Icons|By Name. This should move any icons that have somehow been dragged up into that corner.

If that doesn’t help then it’s probably being caused by a program. The quickest way to see what’s running is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. See if ending any of the running processes makes that spot go away.

You can also go to Start|Run, type msconfig, and uncheck items on the Startup tab until you’ve isolated the cause. If it still happens with everything disabled then it might be some kind of weird video driver issue.

3

When you check your desktop folder, are you sure that you’ve configured windows explorer to show system and hidden files?

4

Also, have a look in Start>Programs>System Tools>System Information and browse the categories under Software Environment - pay particular attention to the program manufacturers, but anything odd should stand out a mile, as unwanted/malicious programs nearly always seem to have stupid-sounding names like SpeedyHelper or ThrustGrabber or something.