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My girlfriend's stepgrandpa's PC has a small annoyance. When you turn it on, an image pops up BEFORE the Windows 98 screen. It's Hello Kitty, and really annoying. Then it disappears, and the Windows 98 screen comes on and it boots to Desktop. It's not the desktop picture, and it's not logos.sys or logow.sys replaced (because the Windows 98 boot-up screen DOES appear). Anyone know where to find this image and how to get rid of it? I haven't had access to the computer yet, but apparently searching for it hasn't led to anything yet.

-Lasereth

My pc does this too, it's an odd bug or something with Active desktop. Just save a copy of the current background under a different name and change your background to that (or just change your background once) and it shouldn't bother you any more.
Maybe someone else can explain to both of us why this is and how to get rid of it completely, but right now I'm too tired to look it up. :p

turn off active desktop :p....

if all your doing is showing pictures on your desktop theres not much need...

I had the same problem a couple of years ago, when I was using Adobe PhotoDeluxe 4.0. I don't remember how I fixed it, but for a while there I had a pic of Kyla Cole fingering herself everytime I booted and shutdown my computer for three or four seconds.

HAHAHAHA.....too funny. I notice with Windows XP, I often get porn icons as desktop icons for items that stay there for a while. WTF? hahaha.

if its appearing before windows boots, its probably not active desktop :)

check the autoexec.bat or config.sys for something odd looking, it might be a dos/win95 virus or trojan that payloads by showing hello kitty pictures.

Does your computer have a default account, and then an account for you (or whoever)?

When at the login screen, it may use the default background that someone set ages ago, and then going into the user's account changes the background to what they have. The login may be automated though, explaining why you don't have the proper prompt there for you.

What I'd try to do is (once logged in) choose Start->Log Out... and see what the background changes to when you are at a login prompt. If this is the case, go to Control Panel->Users (I think it's called that, may be "Passwords".. been a while since 9x stuff) and find out what the other account names are. Then change their backgrounds.

Does the picture appear even before the screen with your hardware info?
Did it always do that since the PC was bought?

I had a PC once where the BIOS displayed a picture from the manufacturer at every start.
You can't get these out unless you modify your BIOS. I didn't have the time so I just left it like that.
With Hello Kitty I would think about doing it though.

sounds like a spash screen for bios to me, what mother board do you have?

It was active desktop. We had to do some configuring, including making a different wall-paper in MS Paint because somehow the grandparents had managed to make every Windows wallpaper they had an active desktop web-image. Thanks for the help everyone!

-Lasereth