Active Desktop Wallpaper Appears Scrambled

When the Active Desktop is enabled on your computer, some wallpaper bitmaps may not display correctly if the wallpaper display mode is set to "Stretch". In addition to multiple horizontal bands of distorted desktop background, dragging or resizing windows can result in additional erratic scrambling. Note that this problem is only likely to occur at higher screen resolutions when you are using the "Blue Rivets" or "Triangle" wallpaper bitmaps (both of these are 16 x 16 bitmaps). Note that if the Active Desktop is disabled, the desktop does not attempt to display the affected stretched bitmaps.

This problem can occur because the Active Desktop Web content display (Mshtml.dll) fails to properly handle an unexpected error from the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) function "StretchBlt()", and this results in the display of improperly-filled bitmaps on the desktop background.

To work around this problem, select a different background picture.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

For additional information about the problem with StretchBlt(), click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: