From: Greg Merritt (gmerritt@uclink.berkeley.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 13 2001 - 10:40:45 PST
One of our users has a Windows 98 machine that will
periodically do some very odd things with text. What typically
happens is that text within a window (say, within the body of a
Eudora message) will all pop over to the left side of the window --
many letters will be drawn on top of one another, rendering the text
unreadable.
This is an emeritus professor's home machine, and he's
brought in a number of screen shots of the problem. It happens most
frequently in Eudora, but he's also seen it happen in other
applications. This seems to be independent of the font face or
formatting (or lack thereof). He can usually close and reopen the
offending window and get things to render correctly, but typically
things go wacky again at the first keystroke. In another example, a
framed Web page showed the left side navigational frame rendered
correctly, but the main page frame was rendered terribly incorrectly.
The issues typically (though not always) go away after a reboot.
He's kept a log of the problem, but there's no clear association
between the issue and any applications or activities.
He brought the machine (cpu only) into campus, and I tried
for several days to make it misbehave. Naturally, it wouldn't.
Well, I did get one odd thing to happen. I went to save a document,
and when the save dialogue box opened, I heard one of the two hard
disks spinning up to wake from sleep, and watched portions of the
rendered screen image go funny. My impression was that the computer
expected to access some information on the sleeping disk in order to
render some screen elements, but that the disk wasn't yet "awake".
After a minute or so it recovered, but I took the opportunity to turn
off disk sleep completely. Unfortunately, the same old text issue
reappeared a few days later after the user had brought the machine
home.
Does this ring any bells with anyone? Any ideas of what to try?
Many thanks,
-Greg
Institute of Transportation Studies
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