MSE and MBAM real time protection work very well together. Avast is bloated and bloating with attendant issues. Where once we recommended MSE/Avast co-equally, you will not see that here any longer which is a very strong indicator.
Have you tried dragging intact with an Aero theme chosen in Control Panel>Personalize? One of our hardware specialists carwiz suggests this.
I would, however, run the RAM test, you can turn the monitor off. It is one of the more important tests to do to eliminate stuff.
I think your use of the term 'artifact' has caused some confusion.
When I'm looking at your image I'm also confused. What am I looking at here?
I'm guessing that that small window in the upper right corner of the pic is the offending item. And the big green arrow you added to point to it.
Is your display really that long? Or am I looking at multiple displays?
Anyway,
That window looks like (I'm guessing here) a 'submenu' (I don't know what else to call it) of files or folders, or images inside the icon/folder you are moving around. Please let me know if I'm on the right track or way off.
Now when I move anything around on my desktop I do not get that 'feature'. I suspect that that may be a feature of a program you are running or a feature that must be enabled in Windows that I am unaware of.
Perhaps a more detailed explanation of all will help. It would be cool to see a bigger pic of what is inside the offending 'window'.
I also think artifact was the wrong term to use, i just don't have the vocabulary to give a better term. Artifacts are normally associated with severe hardware issues.
I have two screens, The left one is 1920x1080, the right one is 1680x1050.
On this occasion the offending feature was dragging a mozilla firefox tab onto the opposite screen. When you drag a tab out of the browser it shows a small graphic next to the cursor as you drag it, basically a print screen of the webpage that was open in that tab as it isn't an interactive graphic. This can be fixed by rebooting firefox and all is good again. This is fairly common for me. I can reproduce this if needed.
I think this may be a firefox issue but im not sure since windows does a similar thing every now and again, which means firefox could just be more prone to this.
Im pretty new to firefox since i switched from opera recently after they switched to the chromium engine. This didnt happen in opera, once again this is why i think this is a software issue.
Sometimes the same thing occurs when dragging a windows folder around the desktop. The little icon of the folder may get stuck. When this happens it is usually more serious. This is where i have to do a full reboot of the PC. I cannot reproduce this on demand, it happens once every two months or so. This was more present when i only had one screen. Its been happening less recently though
Even if i open a full screen directx program the icon will overlay over the top of that.
This is why i think this is a software issue, since if i close the offending program it fixes it. But i don't know of any program that i can close that will fix the dragging of windows files.
As for what was inside the window, it was a youtube video of linustechtips "wan show".
Hope this helps as i have a feeling i explained this pretty badly at first, probably something to do with the time i posted it at...
Just for a quick test, change your desktop and/or theme to something other than black. Don't use the "high contrast" themes supplied by Windows as these disable Aero.
Yes, this is just a test. There were reports some time ago that all black desktops create problems with Aero. It may have been fixed but just try it.
Added: I'm sure I read a MS patch about it but I can't find it.
That didn't help the firefox issue, but it did make me realize what the firefox issue was. I use opera's email client. Turns out firefox doesn't play nice with that, since i always have email open on that screen when its not in use i didn't realize it was whenever firefox touches opera that firefox leaves a ghost there. I guess that solves one issue.
I will have to post back when i next get the issue with windows files and folders. Since i cant replicate that on demand.
Oh yeah - I see it now. Except on my rig I need to minimize Firefox to the taskbar, then when I hover the mouse over the Firefox icon it shows that preview window of whats going on in Firefox. But I can't move that around my desktop.
I will bet you the rest of this beer that this has something to do with one of your programs or combination of open programs. But it is one of those very annoying problems that requires lots of experimentation to find out exactly what combination of events is causing the problem. Never a easy task.
The fact that you are running dual monitors could also contribute to the problem. It shouldn't - lots of people run dual (or more) monitors without issue. But again, some combination of events...
The thing to take away is that this is not a common problem. I've never heard of it and I can't recreate it. The common problems are easy because someone on the forum has usually helped someone to solve them. The hard ones are the ones that only happen on your machine.
So do some experiments and post back here what you discover. Don't shy away from trying anything the folks here suggest. Eventually you or we will get to the a-ha moment.
That's not quite how it works, If you click and hold one of your tabs (at the top of the screen, the web browser ones)You can drag them out of one firefox window and it will create another instance of firefox. For dual monitors its very useful because you can have 2 websites open at once. In two different browsers. You can then drag tabs between them, its a very clever system.
Quote