I'm seeing exactly the same problem as Bargz describes, namely a slowdown of
the desktop background with white lag. It started when I upgraded to IE8 but
my story gets a bit sadder...

At first I didn't realise it was IE8 but I did notice that the white lag
cleared up if I were to stop the explorer.exe process. When I restarted
explorer.exe then the white lag returned. I decided that there might be a
registry corruption causing explorer to slow things down so I did a system
restore to the previous week and then everything then seemed ok.

The following day I noticed that IE8 was no longer working and then I
realised that the restore had restored me to before I installed IE8. So I
reinstalled IE8 and to my dismay the white lag returned.
So next I decided to can IE8 and roll back to IE7. I uninstalled IE8 and
installed IE7 but to my further dismay IE7 refuses to run - it just drops
back to the desktop.
So now my choices are to have IE8 with a slowdown or to move over to Firefox
(which I'm currently using but it keeps locking me up so i want it
uninstalled asap).

Help!

another clue - with IE8 installed then I can't change the background without
a restart. The old background remains on the desktop even after I've changed
it in the display properties window.

My specs are:
Fijitsu siemens Pentium 4 HT 3.6 GHz
2 GB memory
NVidia GeForce 7950 driver version 182.08
Windows XP SP3 with all high-priority updates

Intersting that Bargz also has Pentium HT chip?

any advice appreciated...

---------

"bargz" wrote:

> I have Windows XP SP3, and I decided to install Internet Explorer 8 last
> week. It installed fine, and I used it for a week, but my desktop UI speed
> had become NOTICEABLY sluggish: when I move windows around, there would be a
> white "lag" behind them, similar to turning on "mouse trails" for your
> cursor. It acted like I had disabled video acceleration. Also, YouTube
> videos were jittery and my CPU utilization was very high while watching.
>
> Thinking it may have been outdated NVidia drivers, I downloaded and
> installed the latest release from NVidia's web site, but the situation did
> not improve.
>
> I've searched the web and the newsgroups and cannot find anyone with a
> similar problem; I found some people complained about sluggish WEB PAGES with
> IE8, but my issue is not that web pages are slow to load, but specifically
> it's a problem with my GUI rendering speed.
>
> Anyway, this morning I uninstalled IE8, rebooted, and now my GUI speed is
> back to normal (fast) -- I can move windows around without trails -- so it is
> obviously something with Internet Explorer 8.
>
> My system specs:
> Dell 400SC
> Pentium-4 HT 2.8GHz single core
> 3 GB memory
> NVidia GeForce 7600 GS 512MB AGP 8X, driver version 185.85
> Dual LCD monitors
> Windows XP SP3 with all high-priority updates
>
> Thoughts? Anyone?
>
>