A Weird Computer Screen Problem

I had an unusual computer-problem Thursday night. The left 40% of my desktop was unusable – all of my desktop icons were shifted to the right. If I tried moving an icon left past a certain margin, it disappeared as if sliding off the left side of the screen. If I maximized windows they only took the right 60% of my screen, but some unmaximized windows could be enlarged over the left side of the screen (this wasn’t true for Windows Explorer, though). The strange thing was that my desktop background was just fine.

Here is a redacted screen shot I took of my computer. Notice the partly cut off My Computer icon

I spent an at least an hour and a half fighting with this:

• If I logged in as a different user, my screen would be normal. Apparently, it was just my main account that had this problem.
• I tried deleting the ShellIconCache file – no dice. After deleting the file and rebooting, everything seemed normal until the load process was complete. Then, whoomp, everything got shifted to the right.
• I used Iconoid to attempt to save icon positions. Didn’t work.
• I installed TweakUI 2000 and repaired the icon file. Still no luck.
• I changed my screen resolution. Problem still remained.
• I rebooted into safe mode. The problem didn’t exist then, but returned when I rebooted normally.
• I finally called my GE Service Contract. Turns out that they “only do hardware”. The gentleman I spoke to was very polite, but had no idea what the problem was.

Just after I got off the phone to the Service Center, totally frustrated, I realized that the left 40% of the screen looked like it had an invisible window docked to it. Realization hit me: I had accidentally docked Trillian to the left side of the screen in Wednesday night’s chat. This blank area was exactly the same size. I realized that Trillian must not have closed down properly and every time it restarted it was creating a hidden window docked to the left side of the screen.

I restored Trillian – it was docked on the left side – exactly over the area where I had been having the problem. I undocked it and I could then move all of my icons back to their normal positions. I shut off docking in Trillian and my computer is now back to what passes for normal.

Sometimes, I just love computers. 😉