The first couple of times it happened, I thought it was a fluke. But it just happened again. If I open the window for "show all" emoticons and leave it open after without clicking on one, my entire system freaks out. The screen starts flashing, I have no control over what window I'm looking at, and the only way out of it is to hit the reset button. After which it takes quite a while (like a good 3 minutes after the reboot) for my desktop and icons to come back, other than the taskbar. If I reboot again normally, all is fine and takes the normal 1 or so minute to come back.

I'm clean of spyware (both ad-aware and spybot say so), I'm clean of virus (norton says so), and I just emptied my cache and cookies this morning. Win2kPro, IE6.

Anyone else notice this? Or is this just one of those things where I have a ghost in my machine...

Do you have Service Pack 4 and all the updates available ?

Never experienced that here.

works fine here

Hmmm, sounds like a driver issue for vid card. All that page has is a bunch of animated gifs.

It's onboard video, but I'll dig into it and see if there are new drivers. I think the first time it happened was before I upgraded the system, though I can't be positive.

I must have service pack 4, since it doesn't come up in the list on Windows update, but apparently I've never installed service pack 1, because that does. I don't get it.

I'll do some updates tonight and see if that fixes it. Prolly the kitty case acting like...well...a kitty.

LOL. Onboard vid shares system ram, it may just be an overload with the animations.

Service Packs are cumulative meaning they include all the previous updates / Service Packs.