Jump to page content

Case Study 1 - Windows 2000 SP 4

The bugs shown on this page are now seemingly all resolved (by magic) but the page remains up for historical value. The description was:

Both of our PCs at home (Techies Pentium II machines (333 and 400 MHz) with Matrox graphics cards) display some very peculiar graphical problems with Windows 2000 service pack 4. I have never seen these issues on any other machine, and no-one that I know recognises the problems either. Very strange. The problems are generally characterised by all manner of menu and menu bar display glitches.

Various problems with menus in Windows Explorer. Sometimes, the mutilated menus hide their faces from me in shame:

The problem also occurs in CD Player and Paint:

Another bizarre problem is that of inactive menu bar contents being scrambled, shown in FlashFXP and Task Manager:

Finally, Windows has a strange habit of forgetting to update title bars after a switch to 256 colours and back. When a window becomes inactive, its title bar is no longer changed to the inactive state; the correct colours for inactive windowss are only shown when the inactive title bar is redrawn. You can see where I have dragged a windowshaded Winamp over some inactive window title bars and the correct colours have been restored under the parts that have been redrawn:

You can fix this by reasserting the current colour scheme in the Display control panel.