An unusal 'Start Menu' occurance

[mike2002]

An occurance has happened a couple of times when I go to the 'Start' button.

When the menu pops up, it's twice its normal width, with just a few icons displayed in a much larger size. At the same time a 'General Protection error' box appears, but I haven't made a note of the text. The 'Shut Down' icon disappears from the Start menu, necessitating pressing Alt/F4 in order to shut down or restart.

I roll the Registry back to the last entry but it makes no difference. I cure it by doing a restoration of the C:/ partition (less than 10 minutes - what would I do without it!!), but has this happened to anyone else?

[Paul Komski]

This does ring a bell and I have seen it, I think, after having been into Safe Mode for some reason (or perhaps going into Safe Mode can cure it - I'm not sure). Its either to do with your screen resolution having gone astray or else the icons have gone astray. The latter can often be cured by mending them with TweakUI or by deleting shelliconcache (or its equivalent in WinXP).

A General Protection Error would need investigating more specifically I guess.

[mike2002]

After restoring my C:/ partition from a CR-R, the Start menu/Protection error repeated itself.
The error rerads:-

EXPLORER caused a general protection fault
in module <unknown> at 0000:0000094f.
Registers:
EAX=ffdfffdf CS=0537 EIP=0000094f EFLGS=00000282
EBX=00000000 SS=051f ESP=00000040 EBP=00000006
ECX=001f001f DS=5d4f ESI=00af2e1c FS=0457
EDX=05370934 ES=20f7 EDI=00801038 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
26 89 07 83 c7 04 8b 06 83 c6 04 8b c8 d1 e0 25
Stack dump:
00000000 758e3bb7 0000d449 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 03020100 07060504 0b0a0908 0f0e0d0c 03010200 07050604 0b090a08 0f0d0e0c

As per your suggestion, I rebuilt the icons. This cured the fault message and the Start menu returned to (almost) normal. There was still a slight abnormality in the boxes but I re-ran TweakUL and restarted, which cured it - for the time being at least!
Here is a screenshot of how the Start menu looked when clicked on -
(Can I insert more than one screenshot?)

[mike2002]

Here's another screenshot showing the 'abnormalitiy' in the boxes.