Sometimes when I try to scroll down through a page which hasn’t completely loaded (according to the status bar), the entire page smears (for lack of a better term), rendering the entire page unreadable until the page actually does finish loading, thus correcting the smeared look. This problem has become more frequent recently and I was curious if there was a way to resolve it? Thanks.
I had that problem with my old Win 98 computer, I’d reboot and the problem would be fixed. Sorry I’m not more help, but I never figured out another solution besides rebooting.
First and final bump.
I’m guessing you’re running Win98, with IE5.5 (or thereabouts), because I remember this behavior very clearly with my old PC. I had a very clean machine, with all patches and updates installed, and it still did exactly what you’re describing, so I don’t think there’s any workaround - I think it’s just the way the software behaved when the page hadn’t finished loading.
It went away when I bought a new PC with WinXP and IE6, so that’s the only solution I can recommend!
Actually, I’m using Windows XP and IE 6.0 
How much RAM do you have and what sort of video card?
512 megs of RAM. I have no idea what the vide card is
I saw similar behaviour at my friend’s house - never found out what it was though. The video driver quite a bit to do with window rendering though; try upgrading it.
Is your monitor LCD?
For what it’s worth… mine does it too. It’s a Mitsubishi 19" CRT monitor, Windows 2000 and Nvidia GeForce 2 MX card. I find scrolling up and down the page again sometimes restore normalcy before the page loads completely.
Ihave win2K, ie 6.0 all the patches, etc. I see that effect on only a couple of sites, but it happens at them almost all the time.
The smeared items tend to be graphics rather than text. More and more sites are using graphics that look like text to get fancier looking results.
I suspect that ie was designed to render the text first and then fill in the graphics as they arrive. That behavior is real obvious on a slow modem connection. And it’s a fine design for a mostly-text-with-few-graphics page, but as we get to high-speed download of pages with 500 embedded graphics, the logic breaks down.
So I beleive the program, by design, continues to paint new graphics as received and doesn’t bother to act on the need for repainting old grahics that have moved.
And finally when the page is done loading and all graphics have been rendered, then and ony then does it notice large areas have been invalidated by your scrolling. So it repaints them then and all is well.
It’s not a bug or malware, it’s simply an artifact of a design decision.
That’s my semi-educated guess at least.
Try ALT+TAB to another window then ALT+TAB back to IE, that can force Windows to re-render the page.
I don’t think it’s a problem. When a page is only half-rendered, it can just be a sign of it being busy and still partway through a particular stage of display.
At least, that’s how I’d always thought of it. I just accept it as one of those quirks we have to deal with sometimes.