Several months later and I’m back trying to resolve this again! Yes, I also found the nystrom.nl site back in February and did “have a go” at some of the suggested settings. None fixed it for my account. My thoughts changed when I looked at the name of the registry entry. I’m not a registry expert, but this entry does NOT seem account specific, so I’m guessing it must be a global setting. I obviously need something that is specific to my account. I’m beginning to think that the pain of starting with a new account is going to outweigh the effort in resolving this, though I always like to get to the bottom of things normally. I’ll see if I can find a utility to backup my icons/settings and restore them to a new account.

Many thanks for your help,anyway.
Ken

No, I don’t know. My experiences lead me to think it’s still related to display settings, I can only suggest obvious things like changing the setting to something else, rebooting, then changing it back to “Adjust for Best Appearance”, or trying the custom option to set that one explicitly. In Display terms, is there anything else obvious different between your account and the ones that work? If it was me though, I’d probably just create a new user and run with that, it’s a pain but would probably still be quicker than trying to track this one down.

One other thing, but only for the brave at heart – you could take a look at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, I would suspect that there is a difference somewhere in there between your account and the ones that work. You could either export them both and compare them, or export from one that works and import into the one that doesn’t (but obviously that is risky, and comes with the usual caveats about editing the registry….)
More specifically, the registry entry for this is apparently HKCU\Control panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask , see http://nystrom.nl/tech/microsoft/microsoft_things.html

Thanks
Technomummy.

I have same problem, but only on my account. It used to work, but I noticed several weeks ago it stopped. My wife’s account and a “guest” account both have the option to check/uncheck live preview in Word, Excel etc, and live preview still works for them. But with my account the option is grayed out and I cannot use live preview. I have ensured the “smooth-scroll list boxes” is selected (in fact all options are selected via “Adjust for best appearance” being selected – and it sticks!). I’m using Windows XP Pro SP3. RDP is NOT installed or used here.

The problem is obviously an option on my own account only, but after a lot of looking around and testing, I cannot find the option(s) that need to be changed to get it working for me again. Any further ideas, please?

Many thanks