I am helping someone with a problem affecting her Acer XP Home laptop. The
laptop is less than 3 years old and has been behaving fine. A few days ago a
grayed vertical panel appeared toward the right of the display stretching
from top to bottom and being consistently present regardless of what program
was being used. The only partial exception was when the initial Acer splash
screen appeared. In that instance there was only about a half inch of the
grayed panel visible at the bottom of the screen.

Thinking that the problem might be related the need for an updated driver,
we created a restore point, found the appropriate Intel video driver for the
model and updated it and rebooted. This did not solve the problem so we
reverted to the previous setting.

We then tried rolling back to an earlier date – a few days earlier – this
did not solve the problem. When we went back to an even earlier date, about a
month earlier, the problem was solved – no more grayed panel. I told her to
stick with that as there must have been a software conflict with an update. I
also told her to install updates one by one so that we would know immediately
if there was a problem with one of them and not have to search. She did not
do any updates but when she opened the laptop this morning, it was back to
the vertical gray panel.

Any ideas/solutions would be much appreciated. I am writing here because we
were able to solve it through utilizing Windows Restore Point technology.

Mary

Sorry, posted this in Vista instead of XP. Disregard. I will repost.

"sweeneysmsm" wrote:

I am helping someone with a problem affecting her Acer XP Home laptop. The
laptop is less than 3 years old and has been behaving fine. A few days ago a
grayed vertical panel appeared toward the right of the display stretching
from top to bottom and being consistently present regardless of what program
was being used. The only partial exception was when the initial Acer splash
screen appeared. In that instance there was only about a half inch of the
grayed panel visible at the bottom of the screen.

Thinking that the problem might be related the need for an updated driver,
we created a restore point, found the appropriate Intel video driver for the
model and updated it and rebooted. This did not solve the problem so we
reverted to the previous setting.

We then tried rolling back to an earlier date – a few days earlier – this
did not solve the problem. When we went back to an even earlier date, about a
month earlier, the problem was solved – no more grayed panel. I told her to
stick with that as there must have been a software conflict with an update. I
also told her to install updates one by one so that we would know immediately
if there was a problem with one of them and not have to search. She did not
do any updates but when she opened the laptop this morning, it was back to
the vertical gray panel.

Any ideas/solutions would be much appreciated. I am writing here because we
were able to solve it through utilizing Windows Restore Point technology.

Mary