Bindwood

Cursor, menus, and taskbar icons not rendering correcty in 10.04

Asked by Casey McNeil

I have installed lucid on an older Dell 8500 laptop. Everything works fine except for the mouse pointer, popup menu's, and some icons are corrupted. The are pixelated with a series of small vertical bars running throughout. The mouse pointer has a "ghost twin" that stays to the right of the cursor. Only the cursor and menu icons have the problem. The battery life indicator, wifi signal indicator, and volume control icons are completely scrambled, however the date and time have not problem whatsoever. Neither does the other icons that are located within Firefox, or any other program that I have seen so far.

Nothing I have tried so far has changed anything. The problem persists when booting from the LiveCD as well. Below is the output of "lspci" in case it helps.

Thanks in advance for your help. This is my first question that I have asked here as I can't seem to find any solution in forums so far. Perhaps I just don't know how to describe the problem correctly.

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845 845 [Brookdale] Chipset Host Bridge (rev 04)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82845 845 [Brookdale] Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 83)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV28 [GeForce4 Ti 4200 Go AGP 8x] (rev a1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
02:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4510 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
02:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCI4510 IEEE-1394 Controller

****update****
Tried turning off desktop effects but this did not hep.

I downloaded Nvidia legacy drivers and rebooted. This fixed the display issue but caused a really strange problem; my windows would automatically minimize after about 1-2 seconds. I finally had to alt+ctrl+F1 to open a shell and "sudo apt-get remove nvidia*" to be able to use the laptop again. This caused the display problem to emerge once more.Bah!

Any other ideas?

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Bindwood Edit question
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Casey McNeil
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PeterPall (peterpall) said : 		#1

What you can do is to try to disable desktop effects in System/Preferences/Appeareance and hope the problems are related to the hardware accelleration needed for providing these effects. Or enable them if they were disabled, experimentally.

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Casey McNeil (caseymcneil) said : 		#2

OK, so I worked it out.

The problem was with Nouveau.

I used synaptic to remove the Nouveau driver package and the problem cleared up. No more auto-minimizing windows and no more scrambled icons.

I hope this helps someone solve the problem faster than i did. I was up until 3:45am before I stumbled on to the solution.

Best of Luck!

-Casey McNeil