Resolution Changed without Me

[mommalina]

I shut down computer and monitor last night. When I turned them on this
morning, all the desktop / taskbar / system tray icons were huge! I'm sure I did
not accidentally change resolution or other settings. What could cause this? .. :confused:

Several attempts to manually change things back to normal failed (too small,
or not quite the size I had before). I remembered the resolution settings
but probably not some other things. A System Restore brought everything
back and working fine .. :)

Lina

Dell 4550, XP Home, SP2, XP Firewall, Verizon 3.0 DSL, Firefox 2.0.0.2
60.00 GB, 85% Free Space, 2.53 gigaherz Intel Pentium 4, 768 RAM,
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420, Viewsonic VP 2103 LCD Display
BitDefender 9 Standard Version 7.2, SAS Pro Version 3.6.0.1000
WinPatrol 11.1.2007 (free), HijackThis v1.99.1, jv16 PowerTools (free)
Spider V1.16

[kelly]

Gremlins ...

[X86fun]

eww system restore

[dbarrow]

Cause...
Likely a bad write on shutdown to HKLU reg hive where your settings are kept and it pulled up a default on restart.
The restore replaced from the saved backup.
Had you continued working with that, you may have found other things not working right.

The gremlin in XP lives in the files "saving your settings" that are written on shutdown. I never have run across a full listing of what all these are or where all they get written to. It is the major cause of 90% of system crashes.
Turn off the machine and start it up again to a BSOD or other major fubar.
It just underscores the importance of an OS backup in case system restore or last known good fail to bring it back.