ps3cheats

Question: I was working on a friend's laptop trying to change the taskbar appearance and settings. Somehow I made a change that turned the taskbar black with nothing visible except the 'Start' button which showed as normal. The rest of the desktop displays normally with all icons visible as well as the wallpaper. Right clicking on the desktop now opens a 'black hole' where the context window should be. If I mouse over the window, any fly out windows will also open as black squares, leaving me totally blind for working within these windows.

Opening a folder brings the same result - everything is black except any folder icons within the folder. I have to guess where to click on the X to close the window.

This is a Toshiba notebook running XP with SP2. Rebooting did not correct the problem and in Safe Mode it looks the same. If I could see what I was doing I might have a shot at fixing it!

ps3cheats

Before you do a recovery have you tried to reset the display settings?

Open Control Panel > Display > Themes Tab. Change current Theme to Windows XP and click Apply. This should reset all display settings to a default state.