Task bar - Icons flickering when online

Tom_M wrote:

1995brave wrote:
Reload your video drivers and see if it helps. Here at work we had one of Microsofts Win 7 updates overwrite a section where the video drivers were loaded and caused all sorts of video problems. We reloaded the video drivers and everything started working fine.

I think a better term would be "display drivers". It has nothing to do with playing video. It's drivers for your graphics card.

No, it IS NOT GRAPHICS DRIVER RELATED, IT IS most likely a problem with Win 7 EXPLORER (the DESKTOP EXPLORER, not IE) since 2009...

READ the bottom several posts in the link below

WIN 7 FLASHING TASK BAR

For those too lazy, I am including the text which points to the "fix"..

"Hi All,

Hehehe replying a bit late on the problem,

But FYI i am experiencing the same problem on my end, the entire taskbar (windows and IE and/or Mozilla) both flash, This is not local application issues its not a program attempting to notify the user for input or a process in the system tray, and definity not related to Adobe flash player as its effecting both the internet browser application and the windows explorer.

Background:

I have been running Windows 7 on my laptop for almost 2 years now and recently performed a OS rebuild several months back, the problem starting occuring soon after the rebuild.



Problem:

The problem is not caused by a local application - Not Flash player, not Beta software, it is a Windows! Yes! a windows issue. The problem is will the windows Explorer.exe - The windows shell

The issue is caused by the windows shell, all windows-based applications use the shell, the shell is a user interface and provides an environment for applications and has now become unstable most likely corrupt and will eventually lead to OS failure. I would recommend the following options to take:



1) Recreate user Profile:

C:\users\%username%

"Log in as local admin, rename the effected user account to %username%.OLD and copy all user data from .old to a newly created profile %username%

2) Recreate explorer.exe

SAFEMODE ONLY

Open Regedit

HKEY LM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

There is a key called Shell - explorer.exe

rename key to explorer.exe1

restart

windows should attempted to created a new key for the shell

WARNING *** this also may cause the shell to fail and windows GUI environment fail to load, so take care***

3) Rebuild

I would recommend option 1 if the problem continues, reinstall windows - Its this best option.



4) Mics

For XPs try uninstalling internet explore from control panel "default programs and features" and reinstall, as internet explore and window shell are essentials the same, it will do what step 2 attempts to do. " not too sure if this can be done on Windows 7"

SAFEMODE ONLY

Boot PC in safemode or live usb

On a working machine copy "explorer.exe" from C:\windows directory paste explorer.exe and overwrite the existing explore.exe on you problem C:\windows directory. This is also similar to a result that step 2 would do.



I have seen and experienced problems with the windows shell before, this is also all the symontons of a known windows shell issues, the problem will continue to get worse over time, so PLEASE BACKUP ALL DATA BEFORE TAKING ANY OF THE STEPS I HAVE SUGGESTED"

A simple internet search found this as the most likely suspect, however before attempting this "fix" I would recommend running a virus, adware and malware search FIRST.

Why?

Simply because any of those items can do harm to any part of your OS and you need to make sure your PC IS FREE of unwanted software..

Did you download anything recently? Why do I ask? simply put, many free software now days is riddled with Adware and you need to PAY attention to the program installer and cancel anything you DON'T want...