After an incredible amount of odd behavior from my computer, I had no choice but to reformat the thing yet again. Every time I do so, it only starts bugging up after another 6 months, presumably because of all the garbage sony loads with the recovery disk I can never truly uninstall. I'm stuck in this situation until Windows Vista comes out, but right now I have a very specific problem...

My most recent reformat was about 2 weeks ago. I spent a good 2 hours uninstalling offers for free trials, quicken, a trail version of norton, etc. After that, I spent the rest of the day downloading windows updates.

Everything seemed to be working fine. I downloaded the uxtheme.dll patch, but aside from that, I did nothing "weird" with my computer. No alternative shells, no addon programs like a window snapper, nothing. After I installed the uxtheme.dll patch, I even tested it thoroughly to ensure there wasn't problems.

Things remained perfectly fine and fast, until a short while ago. Now, suddenly, my task manager appears to be badly mangled. The following are missing from it:

- Title bar, though the rest of the window from still works, so it is resizable.

- The context menu on the taskbar item, as well as the name from the taskbar - This prevents me from closing it normally.

- The tabs, this means I can only view the list of open windows, and cannot switch to the process tree or anything else.

Because of these three problems, the task manager is not only useless, but if I open it out of habit, it cannot be closed until the computer is restarted, since all means of doing so are closed to me. Having an unclosable always-on-top window is quite irritating.

The first thing I suspected was that the uxtheme.dll patch had done it. I uninstalled the patch, and the problem remains.

The second thing I thought was that a virus is doing it, but AV antivirus is reporting nothing. I would also imagin that anyone intentionally trying to disable the task manager would remove functionality in a different way. This looks like a glitch, and not something someone did on purpose.

Some other possibly relevant facts:

- My CD drive was replaced by my warranty because it was making noises that required me to cover my ears so long as the CD was in the drive. When the guy replaced it, the new CD drive only functioned for a short while before it needed a pin to open up. Now it is completely dead.

- The only other software problem with my computer at the moment is that it's running incredibly slow. Just opening a window is a huge burden. I can't see what process is doing it because...well...yea. Other than that, the computer is functioning perfectly.

borrow a good windows disk same version as yours .from a friend or who ever ,one that is not a sony or dell or gateway, you know not a recover install disk ,and use it along with your key ,to get a install with out all the s-it

Well, now I feel quite stupid. After finding the right search terms on Google, I came across this:

http://www.pchell.com/support/taskmanager.shtml

However embarrassing it is to put this, it's worth saying if anyone has the problem in the future. To anyone who doesn't want to follow the link, simply double-click the border of the Window to fix it. Why it didn't occur to me to try this is beyond me.

Markng thread as solved