Well this is quite an old problem caused by a trojan a long time ago. three years or so. In any case it left my desktop background icons unable to have tranparency. Heres a screenshot.

http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/a.../ssfordani.jpg

Disreguard the Skin and Sidebar because they are not the cause of this. Also ignore the emulators.

Oh and computer is a emachines(dont buy one they stink) running Windows XP Professional.

So have you not removed the trojan yet as you say the problem is 3 years old or so?

No its longs gone. My computer is clean and everything else works just fine. Also another bit of info. If I do a system restore to as far back as I can go the icon will be transparent until I open a window or try and change the desktop.

First let me say you must have one of the good EMachine if you haven't had to format it in 3 yrs .
have you tried changing the setting for it in control panel/system/advanced /performance /settings and do a for best performance setup,check off the 5-6-7 ones from the top and the bottom 3 in the list

Hehe, its after I had the trojan I came to daniweb in the first place and then dedicated myself to learning how to be a malware removal expert. And while I don't consider myself the best I do think I do a lot better job then some people hired to do the stuff I do. i.e. Geeksquad. So I do keep my computer clean and In the best running condition I can. Not to mention replacing and improving parts.

Anyways yes I've tried all that, possibly every combination of checks and unchecks. Unfortunetly nothing seems to work. :\

have you tried creating a new user acct. and see how its desktop works out

comtrol panel (classic view) -> system -> advanced -> perormance buttom -> make sure every box is ticked (i think the usual culprit is "icon drop shadow")

if that doesnt work, download TweakUI and play around with the effects in that

Yup I tried messing with all those already. I noticed drop shadow as well but nothing changes whether its checked or not.

I'm downloading TweakUI now although I remember downloading it a while ago and nothing worked. :/

I had something like that too. Did you try to
-right click arrange icons by.....
-unselect lock web items on desktop?
I think it had something to do with that, but I might be wrong..

Looks like that you had a good run with ur e machine but the E-Curse is catching up with ya...