When I right-click on the desktop to launch the properties box (Background/Screensavers/Setup etc) the hourglass pops up and that's it - it just stays there. The cursor arrow doesn't return and the prop. box doesn't launch. I have to reboot the comp to get back to the desktop. I am running Leadtek Winfast A340T 8xAGP card, GeForce 5200. Although I suspected the card initially, swapping back to a standard pci graphics card results in the same thing. I have reinstalled the drivers off the orig. CD but I no longer suspect it's a card or video driver problem. What could be causing this lockup effect? The hourglass is moveable with the mouse, but nothing can be selected of course.

Do you run any spyware or anti-virus programs? If not, you might be interested in this online scan If it finds anything save the log as a text file and feel free to post it back here for me. I can't see any reason why your problems would be connected to your graphics card. Proud member of Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals since 2005. ASAP

No joy so far. Have run Adaware, AVG and Spybot. Run Hijack This too. Thought I'd found it when Spybot found "Windows Desktop Launcher" - but cleaning that out hasn't fixed it. Did registry cleanup but the right-click/hourglass problem is still with me. Any more ideas?

gazzapee, The info at the link below may be of some help. Right-click is slow or weird behavior caused by context menu handlers Tufenuf

You are on to it tuf. Prior to reading your post just now, my computer-savvy son had pointed me to a program called ShellExView (nirsoft.net). Sorting by Type and looking at the Desktop Context menu group, I went first for the NView desktop context menu and disabled it. That fixed the right-click 'hanging' problem straight away. I cannot see any other effect of disabling this item as the NVidea sceen properties prog still works as normal and I have all my right-click on desktop functions working normally again. I took someone elses advice when I first looked at the long list of cm's. I divided the list in half and disabled that half first. This resulted in problem fixed, so then restored them (enabled) and then restarted disabling each one in turn. I was just very lucky that the NVidea one I turned off first (starting at the bottom of the half group) was the culprit, as a reboot is required each time and it would have taken lots more time to work thru them all one-by-one. I knew nothing about this aspect of pc's and have learnt a lot thru this problem. To Bloodhound, I always suspected that it was something to do with the graphics, not the card in this case, but the NVidea dll's associated. Always trust a hunch? Thanks for your suggestions guys. gazza