Installation of XP Mode and consequent effects to WIN 7 themes

First of all hi,

This is my first post and I hope I have directed it to the correct thread.

I installed XP mode (I am running WIN7 pro x64) and have found that it works well, unfortunately a slightly strange side effect cropped up and I was wondering if anyone else has had experience with this.

Once installed my windows themes would start displaying a horizontal strip (roughly 100px in height) of purely random content. That is to say I could not find any matching background image for this random strip in the available images within the personalisation area, it looks like a floral bit of wallpaper.

After a few restarts this line would not disappear but it would shift location, seemingly at random. Then I noticed that in open windows the description bar would look like it had bad static, to the point that it was not legible. This also combined with the windows logo in the bottom left which suffered from the same effect.

I gave up on it and uninstalled XP Mode and the other updates applied by MS for the VM. This solved the problem immediately.

I happened to be installing XP Mode at work (also win 7 pro x64) and exactly the same thing happened, this time however it was a shorter strip (about 30px high) of solid blue background.

Has anyone seen this before? Do you know why it happens? and is there anyway to stop it?

Having re-installed on the home PC I don't seem to have this problem again. I haven't yet installed all the software into the XP Mode that I originally had. I will do this one at a time and track it to see if any of these cause the issue to crop up.

Issue has re-appeared again. I can see no reason for it. No new software installed on win7 or xp environments. This time the image appears to be another of the background themes.