Windows 7: Characters constantly overlay the taskbar graphic

It goes away when I resize the taskbar by dragging it upward, then happens again several minutes later.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Picture:

Are you using some other theme or program to provide a Windows 7 non-standard Taskbar?

No. I have the classic theme enabled and quicklaunch enabled, and I unpinned any programs from the taskbar. The problem existed before I enabled quicklaunch.

Try changing from Windows Classic to Windows Basic theme as a test, see if that makes a difference.

Also, what about screen resolution?

I get this from time to time as I use Classic Theme on this machine allot. It is an undocumented feature. You can resize the task bar and sometime it will go away.

Yes the problem goes away with the Basic theme, but I want to use the Classic theme.

The resolution is the native recommended resolution - 1280 x 1024.

It is a windows bug. It has always done it on Windows 7 classic mode. Microsoft have not felt the need to fix it. There is nothing you can do to fix it if you use Classic Mode. I get it on this machine from time to time and on virtual machines using classic mode.

Okay but this installation went for months without this problem then it came up about 3 weeks ago. Do you have any Microsoft documentation of this?

If you look at my screen shot just above the # 35 in the tray you will see the tray is not drawn correctly and the letters of garbage appear. This only happens in this mode. On this machine I also have separate hard drives with Windows 7 32 bit Ultimate and Windows 64 bit Enterprise with aero enabled. There is no problem with those or this windows installation running aero. On any of them if I set it to classic it will randomly not draw the tray correctly and place letters and other cr*p on the top of the taskbar. The program Shelltoys CFi ShellToys: context menu shell extensions for Windows
has an option to change the clock setting to a much more advanced clock. This gets messed up totally and appears at a strange angle. I reported the bug to the author but he never fixed it. Works fine in aero mode. There are many windows bugs deemed no need to fix and this is one of them.