Disappearing Icons
 

This is been happening quite a lot of late: my screen will blink and go black for a second and when it returns to normal all of the icons in the tool bar (the icons to the far right) are all gone except for my Norton. What gives? How can I fix the problem? Thanks for any help you can offer.

My rig:
Dell 8100
Pent 4 1.3
768 RAM
M-Audio Rev. 7.1
ATI 9700 Pro
Exeltron 4 Pencil Holder (o'clocked to hold 5)

Maybe Norton is trying to tell you something...
Did you try running it? I don't know much about PCs, but I've heard that Norton can fix a lot of things.

I can't really help on this but I have to say - I laughed so hard at the pencil holder comment I thought I was going to be sick

When ever my screen blinks like that it is usually when it changes resolution like exiting from a game that runs at 1024x768 while the desktop is set to 1280x1024.

So what are you doing when your screen flickers like this? What programs are you running in the background?

Everything I run appears at 1024x768. The only game I am playing right at the moment is Age of Mythology but my problem has never occured once I exit from that program. I have running in the background: Norton Antivirus, Popup Killer, ATI control panel, and my printer (Lexmark) control panels. Cuuld these programs come into conflict? There hasn't been a set pattern or at least one that I could detect when this problem happens. I am baffled and confused.

How many icons do you have up ?. You may need to run defrag more often and also use ad-aware, Spybots works good to!.