I recently set up an old laptop here at work for data entry use (specifically, for EndNote data entry and simple Excel spreadsheets). I wiped the hard drive and did a clean installation of Win98SE and the various programs that would be needed. Everything worked just fine.
Lately, however, something odd has been happening. Blank buttons are appearing in the task bar, and fruitfully multiplying - really, one day when I took a look, there were something like 80 of the little buggers there (with sort of an arrow to a condensed “listing” of same, since obviously that many buttons wouldn’t fit across the screen). These buttons are just like those that show up for open programs, folders, etc., except that they are completely blank, and disappear once they’re clicked on. The appearance of these buttons doesn’t seem to interfere much with normal work, except when there’s a boatload of them, and then the laptops slows.
I’ve checked the list of running processes and there isn’t anything that seems out of the ordinary. Although the laptop is wirelessly connected to the LAN and has internet access, the employee using the laptop says she hasn’t downloaded anything that might be causing trouble (she can just about get around for the tasks she needs to do, so I don’t doubt her). Any ideas as to what’s happening, and how I can fix it?
Well, you can’t really tell what processes are running in Win98 thank to the craptacular task manager that ships with it. I’d recommend that you download this little app - a Windows NT/2000/XP-style Task Manager for Win98. It looks exactly like the NT one; although it won’t allow you to actually kill any rogue processes, you can at least see where they’re coming from.
I also assume that you’ve run an MSCONFIG and seeing what’s running at startup?
This is a famous bug in 98, and afaik there’s nothing to be done about them. However, I remember finding them to be more prevalent when another program was either unstable, or hogging resources.
Well, I wouldn’t exactly call this a “famous” WIndows 98 bug, since entering “Windows 98” “taskbar bug” in Google got exactly two hits - this page, which seems to indicate that it’s either bad programming or perhaps a Registry error. The thing is, we won’t know what’s causing the error until he can isolate which process is causing it. If he runs Win98 by itself all day and it doesn’t happen, we can probably assume that’s not it. If he runs IE + Win98 by themselves all day and it doesn’t happen, we can probably assume that’s not it. It might just be one of the installed apps, but we can’t know this until we figure out what processes are running.
Well, I’m a keyboard hound myself, but have never seen this happen with IE+ALT-TAB. But that’s just me. And many of those 91 hits are application-specific. Hell, one of them is even about Gnome!
I also just noticed that about 84 MB of 96 MB of RAM is in use. :eek: I have NO idea what could be such a hog.
From what I’ve seen, the buttons show up most often when EndNote is running, but one just appeared now as I was running the Task Manager and EndNote is closed.
It always seems to be related to the screen saver. When I’ve been away from the computer for a while, and the screen saver starts up, then I come back and move the mouse and do some work, there is a blank box on the task bar. And when I go away again for a while, the screen saver kicks in again, and creates another box on the taskbar. For some reason, it does not re-use the existing one that’s already there.
I am using Seti@home as my screen saver, but I think this happened before I installed that, back when I was uisng one of the default Windows screen savers.
When I come back to my computer, I just click on the blank boxes, and they go away. No effect on performance or anything else that I can notice.
