I installed LiteStep and it had it's advantages. I then wanted to switch back to the classic windows shell (on Win2K)

When my system rebooted in the standard Windows shell, I no longer have use of the top portion of my screen (100 px or so, about the hight of the taskbar in LiteStep). I have uninstalled LiteStep, and I still have the problem. So I then installed it again thinking I had a bad instal. Same problem.

All that shows is my desktop background. When I maximize my windows, they will not move into that top portion. I can't move destop icons into that space either, but my mouse will go over it.

Here is a screenshot: http://www.john-riches.com/desktop.jpg

Can anyone help me on this?

Thanks in advance

you could redefine the desktop margins in your litestep theme, or alternatively load one that uses the full screen... DOn't know why this should have any effect on Explorer behaviour though.

Have you tried changing your display resolution to a lower setting, then back to your normal one? I'm not sure what else to suggest, but sometimes doing that will jog some registry settings back into place....

fiddle around with the taskbar size and location too. It thinks that space is still reserved for teh litestep "bar"

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I have tried changing the resolution up and down to no effect. I have changed the size of the taskbar to two, three and four rows high. I've Made my taskbar auto-hide, put it on top, on bottom, on the left, right and top of the screen. Nothing. http://www.john-riches.com/desktop.png

However, as you can see in the above capture, the 100px or so bar shifts up and down with the size of my taskbar. This bar has no response to click events. I can't even right click on it to select display properties.

Anyone have any ideas, or know of a site that documents this. I'v looked and looked, but have found nothing that works, or mentions this problem.

As a last resort you could try this:

1. Reboot your system and press F8 when the system starts up to get the boot options menu. There should be an option there for a "VGA only" boot. Select that -- it will load a low resolution, failsafe video driver.

2. Log in as you normally would. If you're able to get your full desktop area under the failsafe VGA option, open up the device manager and uninstall/remove the entries for your monitor and video card, in that order. (Even if you can't get the full desktop area you may still want to try removing the monitor entry.)

3. Reboot normally and let Windows reinstall the hardware.

I would highly recommend that you make a backup before doing this, tho. It shouldn't result in any situation you can't recover from, but it's always better to have a safety net.

I just tried uninstalling the video card, and when it reinstalled it, same problem.

It's odd. The system is fine for about 10 seconds into logon, then something triggers this, and it shifts down. I don't see any unframiliar processes running in the background.

Is there anything in your startup folder or registry start group that might be there to tweak your display settings? You might want to open the configuration utility (msconfig.exe) and try selectively disabling any startup items that might be doing this.

Also, you might want to try logging in from or creating another account to see if it's a system-wide problem or if it's something specific to the current profile.

What kind of video card are you using? You might want to check and see if there are any support files that get installed with it (ATI control panel, etc.), uninstall those and repeat the device removal/reinstall process if other things don't work.

Well, thank you everybody for your help. I don't know what the problem was, and I will never know. I took this as a hint to start fresh and re-install. Just thought I'd put some sort of closeure on this, should someone have the same problem later on.