Mafia Leader
October 1st, 2006, 04:40 PM
Okay, so say I've been gaming in a HL2-based, Steam-managed game. I quit out of the game and BAM. I get a visual lock-up. My mouse still works, but everything else is frozen; Z-ordering, window creation, window closing, any form of updating to any window (like IRC or MSN), and the task bar, including the start menu.
The ONLY way I can undo this is by restarting my machine (soft-off from power button), and every time, just before it hits the blue "saving your settings" window, everything unfreezes, updates pour in, and programs shut down like normal. This suggests to me that there's an overlay covering up all my windows, that is Z-ordered to be on top all the time, because alt-tab does nothing, yet everything is still responsive (such as ctrl+alt+del bringing up a window, even though I can't see it happen.)
I've only just recently had this problem since I rebuilt my machine using Windows XP Service Pack 2, and this isn't the only problem I've had since moving off Service Pack 0. TBH, Service Pack 1/2 destabilised Windows. :/
The ONLY way I can undo this is by restarting my machine (soft-off from power button), and every time, just before it hits the blue "saving your settings" window, everything unfreezes, updates pour in, and programs shut down like normal. This suggests to me that there's an overlay covering up all my windows, that is Z-ordered to be on top all the time, because alt-tab does nothing, yet everything is still responsive (such as ctrl+alt+del bringing up a window, even though I can't see it happen.)
I've only just recently had this problem since I rebuilt my machine using Windows XP Service Pack 2, and this isn't the only problem I've had since moving off Service Pack 0. TBH, Service Pack 1/2 destabilised Windows. :/