Member Avatar for kes166

Hey all,

I was asked a question and I had no idea what the answer was and made up some story about information being stored incorrectly in the memory of the laptop or some such thing. Honestly, I had no idea what the answer was, so I'm hoping someone here does.

Often times, while running windows, the desktop icons or the desktop will go black. When you mouse over where the icons are supposed to be, they appear, and the desktop appears while moving the mouse as if it's being painted. What causes that? Is it the the windows cache, physical memory, or something else?

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The behaviour you describe — the desktop going black and only “painting” when you move the mouse — is usually a redraw/graphics pipeline problem, not a mysterious corruption of RAM. Mouse movement forces partial repainting, so the fact that icons reappear under the pointer points at one of these common causes: a buggy or crashed display driver, Desktop Window Manager (DWM) or explorer.exe failing to refresh, a third‑party shell/desktop utility interfering with painting, or (less often) a corrupted icon cache.

Triage checklist:

  • See whether other windows also fail to redraw. If the whole UI is affected, suspect the GPU/driver or DWM.
  • Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc). If Explorer looks hung, right‑click it and Restart. Check whether dwm.exe is running and whether CPU/GPU is unusually high.
  • Boot to Safe Mode. If the problem disappears there, a third‑party driver or shell extension is likely.
  • Check Event Viewer -> Windows Logs -> System for errors mentioning the display driver, TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) or driver files like nvlddmkm / amdkmdag / igdkmd64.

Useful fixes to try (safe, commonly effective):

  • Update or clean‑reinstall the graphics driver using the vendor package (Intel/NVIDIA/AMD) rather than just Device Manager’s auto update. Create a restore point first.
  • Rebuild the icon cache and restart Explorer:
taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
del /A /Q "%localappdata%\IconCache.db"
del /A /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*"
start explorer.exe
  • Run system integrity checks:
sfc /scannow
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Also check for third‑party desktop utilities (fences, icon managers), run a full antivirus scan, and test with a different monitor or onboard graphics if possible. For : admitting you don’t know and following a structured troubleshooting path is the best approach. For : that advice is sound — give measured steps rather than a guess. If the problem persists, capture times and Event Viewer entries and report those details when seeking further help.

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

When you are asked a technical question and you don't know the answer it is always acceptable to say "I don't know". Making shit up is not just bad; it's plain malicious. It can cause the person who asked the question to either stop looking for the answer or waste a lot of time trying to fix the problem based on your incorrect answer. In any case, once the person discovers that you had no idea what you were talking about, he/she will likely start telling people that you are unreliable. Is that the reputation you want to cultivate?

As to your question - I don't know.

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