My drop-down menus will not stay open long enough to make a selection,

My drop-down menus will not stay open long enough to make a selection, also the borders on all my opened apps.are flashing about once a second. Has anyone ever had this problem and has a fix.

Welcome to seven forums Lyle34,

Are the background windows and the front window that has the "focus" all flashing at the same time or alternating fome one to the next and so on?

mike

Something is constantly stealing focus on your machine. By no signs of infection, what have you done to determine that? I would run "sfc /scannow" from an elevated command prompt in the meantime in case there are corrupted system files.

Lyle,

Which "spyware" scanners? ...or hopefully "malware" scanners?
Do You have active antivirus app running? What is it's name? Is it updates automatically, and frequently?
Is windows autoupdate on and fully updated?
Is this a new system or did this problem just start occurring suddenly? if the latter, then when?
Assuming you can somewhat pinpoint ~when it started, was any software installed around or just prior to this time? Think hard..anything?
Does this happen from the moment windows is loaded until shutdown? with everything you do?
When a window in the background is flashing does the taskbar button change in color?
Do you mean dropdown menus in the flashing window only, or all windows? and you do mean drop down menus AND Taskbar menus? will it "pop you off" the start menu as well?
Are you certain it's all types of apps and not just that you usually only use a particular one (like an internet browser, usually)?
Lets say notepad, calculator and a windows explorer window (any folder) are open in that order, what happens? then close all and repeat. same exact problems in the same order every time you repeat? ..or does it randomly just start at some arbitrary point, which differs with each repeat?
if your opening menus by clicking once on a menu (i.e. Files) and then moving the pointer over the selection and clicking it, try a different technique: move pointer over the menu, press and HOLD DOWN left button "drag" the pointer into the list it should highlight the menu items as you hover over them. As long as you hold the button down is it holding the menu open now?

My apologies for the barrage of questions, but the clearer the problem is presented, the more likely that I or someone else can help. Just answer as many as you can, and as briefly as needed to be clear. It certainly sounds like malware of some type, but could be some type of conflict between software that you have installed, esp. a program that starts when windows boots. We may have to take a look at your startup programs and/or active processes to see whats going on. Make sure you describe the a/v software and scans you ran.

Thanks,
Mike

My screen would blink about every second and the drop down menus would not stay open. I would have to retype things all the time because it would "refresh" mid-sentence and skip a letter or start over completely. Forget about copying and pasting, it would not cooperate. I discovered I had a virus labeled as a microsoft service, so I disabled it and now everything works peachy. This was after I ran a full virus scan and malware scan, it didn't show up anywhere.

I did a soft boot using msconfig, and first disabled all microsoft services. Then I unchecked half of all of the other services and restarted my computer. I kept doing this until all of the other services were unchecked (by eliminating half of the remaining checked services), and when the problem still happened that told me it was most likely a Microsoft service. So I continued by unchecking the Microsoft services, half at a time, then half of them, until I isolated the problem. After about a billion computer restarts, I discovered it was a service labeled "Svcboot_cforhvjha". I reset the computer to "start as normal" under the general tab, and then unchecked the problem service. I am doing the Snoopy dance, I don't have to hit any key with a sledgehammer now. Just hope this helps someone....