XP Desktop resizing itself?

I've been having an annoying quirk when coming back to my laptop recently, and I don't know what to make of it. The icons on my desktop are arranged in a certain way, but when I come back to my PC from a fresh boot up or coming out of hibernation, the items on the Windows desktop have been moved around. It appears they are moved in such a way as if the resolution of my monitor had been decreased. The same thing is happening to program windows that are left open during a hibernation - they are only about half the size of what they were when I left them.

Having to re maximize programs is one thing, but my desktop icons constantly getting jumbled when I want them to be in a specific way is annoying... Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Set everything the way you live it.

Close all programs.

Double click MY COMPUTER, set its size to teh way you like explorer windows. Now choose TOOLS > FOLDER OPTIONS then choose the VIEW tab. Scroll down and CHECK the box "REMEMEBR EACH FOLDER'S VIEW SETTINGS."

Click the APPLY TO ALL FOLDERS button, click OK, close the MY COMPUTER window, reboot.

Fix?

 

You sir, are a genius. That fixed it. Thank you very much.

 

It would appear I spoke too soon. The problem persists. This time I closed my laptop lid and came back to it a few minutes later. It remained on the whole time. When I returned and opened the lid, everything had downsized itself again, desktop included....

 

Do a thorough virus, trojan, and malware/adware scan. You might also want to pick up a registry mechanic program that will examine and fix errors in your registry.

 

I was wondering if I was the only one having this problem and it seems like I'm not!

I have an Inspiron 9300 with truelife, but currently with the resolution set at 1680x1050. Now I have everything set the way I want it and when I close the lid of my laptop while its still on and then after a few seconds I reopen the lid, everything is moved around and all active windows are resized much smaller than they originally were.

Could this be video driver related, because I've been playing around with other nvidia drivers for my geforce 6800 go and after having little success I reinstalled the drivers I got from the Dell support website 8.4.3. Now with other drivers I've tried out, even though they don't work too well on my laptop, they don't resize everything after I close the lid. But for these older drivers that's exactly what happens. So maybe this is the problem? Can anyone help?

 

OK, lets try this

In VISTA, there is a touchpad setting that may be put there by the touchpad driver. It may be there on XP as well

Go into control panel > mouse and look for the device settings tab

On that tab , you can adjust the size, position, and action of the various zones on your touchpad

Shut off the window resizing and any other things you find here.

 

I tried that, but to no avail. I just don't know why its doing this as I've been running 84.30 drivers before installed from R121867.exe I get from dell support website and didn't have this problem before. Yet now when I've reinstalled them I do get this problem.

 

Well, I don't know...I am curious as to how you removed the old drivers...or did you just write over them?

I would remove them using control panel, then run driver cleaner (google it, look for older free version) in safe mode. Then restart and reload the older drivers

 

I did uninstall drivers before I installed newer ones (the 160.xx) version drivers. And when those didn't work, I uninstalled and installed maybe close to 10 other versions of drivers ranging from the old 80.xx versions to different makes of the 160.xx versions.

I guess I should have taken the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it route' but I was thinking maybe the new drivers would be an improvement over those ancient 84.30 drivers and now I have this resizing problem.

 

Just chiming in to say I have the same problem on a desktop, but my icons get rearranged when another user logs on, and then I switch back,

Thought it might be the second user has different resolution settings, but that's not the problem,

Other than that I can't see what could cause it,

 

Looked around in the control panel, and there are no resizing options for the touchpad in mouse settings...

 

I found this fix using Google. I used it and tested it - it works.

 

Wow it worked! THANKS SOOOO MUCH!!

I'm soooo happy that everything is almost back to normal now. The only thing that's different from before is that when I open the lid now, the screen comes on for a split second and then it goes off for like half a second before it comes back on again for good. I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this?

Regardless though, I'm just happy everything is just about back to normal.