Start button appearance and behavior

[Jpeg9999]

Has anyone seen this before?

My start button occasionally appears gray and squarish (see attachment #1). This is on top of the normal start button; if I make the squarish one transparent, I can see the original one (attachment #2). If I move the taskbar, the start button no longer moves with it (attachement #3). Now my first guess would be a corrupt theme file or something like that. But I cannot seem to find a solution to this problem. I just want the normal start button...

Here's what I've tried with no success:

Renewing the icon cache (including reboots)
Swapping out all the theme files from my laptop

 

[Brink]

Hello Jpeg, and welcome to Windows 7.

Did you install any theme or skin modifying programs?

Where did you get your copy of Windows 7 at? You may have a bad copy, or a corrupted installation.

Either way, you might consider doing a repair install to fix this if you do not have a bad copy.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[DarkDavil]

Is that a "ahem" torrent version/cracked one...? Because when i was curious to check out office 2010, i downloaded a torrent version, and the menu/save button looked kinda-of like and awkward square - like that !

 

[Jpeg9999]

I've used the same installation on my laptop with no issues. Only difference was that my laptop, which is older, wont do Aero. So I realized that this problem is caused due to a conflict between the Aero theme and glass2k (program I am using make each window completely transparent, just a little).

The problem is intermittent because windows doesn't always load glass2k at the same time when booting up.

I appreciate your ideas! As you can guess, this issue was pretty annoying~

 

[Brink]

No problem Jpeg. I'm happy to hear that you found the source of the problem.