Taskbar window preview only appears for a fraction of a second.

Hi. I'm new here and I need help with this problem.The little thumbnail that appears when you mouse over the icons on the taskbar (see black arrows in image 1) only appears for a fraction of second when I hover the cursor over them. In the past, they would stay there until i move the mouse away or click on them like any normal windows 7 taskbar.

Also if I click on anything from the right side of the task bar like the volume, internet connection,and pc issues buttons a similar thing happens. Lets say I click on volume volume, then the volume thing pops us and disappears after a fraction of a second (see red arrows in image 2). I had to perfectly time the crtl+print screen
buttons to get the images while typing this.

I think is was caused by this:
Last night, I was trying out applications on my samsung galaxy s4 that allow it to control the vlc player on the pc. I tried two programs. Both required me to download the program both on the pc and my phone to set them up.These are the two programs i tried: "VLC Direct Pro Free" and "Remote for VLC". So for each of these programs I have one part on my phone and the corresponding part on the pc. They required me to download a little thing called vlcdirect.ok. I think it put something in my registry, i'm not sure.

Since that was the last thing I did before the problem started, I suspect that that is the cause. I'm worried about getting the vlcdirect.ok thing out of my registry without messing things up more.

The problem seems to have disappeared today. Hmm. Anyway if anyone experiences similar problems, all I did was shutdown last night and start the pc today.