Won't go to screen saver/screen off

I have XP Sp2, all updated. I use Mcafee online, Microsoft Antispyware, and Spybot, all updated and running. My computer is set to screen saver after 10 minutes, monitor standby after 20 minutes. No system standby.

Recently, I've noted that frequently, when I come back to my computer, the monitor is showing my desktop - it hasn't gone to standby. When I move the mouse, I see a very quick flash of what appears to be a program box closing on the bottom bar, then all works normally. At times, it goes to screen saver and standby just fine, other times, especially every night, this strange thing occurs and when I come in in the morning, there's the desktop. I don't have any unknown programs open or running in the background - I've checked start-up and msconfig for them - I don't know what that mysterios box is. Any ideas or ways to find out?
Thanks.

 

I am not much of a Win XP person yet , but do get insights into it's mysterious ways...sometimes. I hope an XP person may see something.

Could it be that you have disabled a program with msconfig that relies on being run by a program/service that is already running?

I would re-enable programs in msconfig, especially those that seem to be OS (Windows) based. See how it runs then.

Matt

 

Thanks. I've looked into those programs - my Antispyware updates at 10AM so that's not it. I'm still looking into the others. As far as msconfig, I haven't changed anything there in quite a while, since long before this problem started, so I don't think that's it. Still looking. Thanks.

 

Any pets?
I had this problem once and found out my Siamese cat was hitting my optical mouse to get it to flash when I left the room. (She also discovered she could turn it on when I had wake on keyboard enabled. Turned that off. )
If an optical or very sensitive mouse, is there any vibration source (trucks rumbling down the road) which could account for it?

 

Would this (or could this) be recorded by Event Manager or some other logging program??

If you are quick, maybe you could capture a Printscreen image. Press Printscreen when you see the program box. Paste the image into the Paint program.

Matt

 

Get Diskmon and Filemon from http://www.sysinternals.com/FileAndDiskUtilities.html (free) and track down exactly what is causing the behavior.