I nailed it down further, but feel even more bewildered by the problem:

I can start dosbox as many times as I wish by clicking directly on the executable. No corruption!
BUT if I use the desktop shortcut, corruption will happen!

I have checked further and it seems to depend on:
starting from a desktop link
to a fullscreen AND surface setting of 0.72.

If I don't launch directly to fullscreen
or use overlay
or use a link to dosbox, the corruption does not happen.

Odd...

This happened to "My Documents" for me. I found entering and exiting a game would solve it. If not I used TweakUI to rebuild the icon cache. Extremely annoying, I'd say. It has something to do with switching video modes and colors that causes XP to corrupt icons.

You say overlay doesn't cause it? Then use that instead, as it shouldn't make much of a difference right? For me neither mode helped. 🙁

Luckily Vista doesn't have any such problems.

This is an XP problem. Try running "Lords of The Realm II", "Lords of Magic", "1602", or any other 9X game that used 16bit color or lower. There's a 50/50 chance that a random icon on your desktop will be the older-looking 16bit version when the game exits. The easy fix is to chaneg teh desktop color to 16bit, then back to 32bit. This way you don't need any extra software to fix the issue. Chew out MS for this one, I know it can be annoying.

No I think he's on to something. cuz I've noticed it my self. and it was only the My Computer icon. at first I just thought I was tired and imagined it. But I didn't. That icon was in 16bit for some weird reason

I used to have a similar problem. Make sure you have the latest version of your video drivers and of DirectX
What are your configurations? (Video card, OS version, etc.)

hehe. no. this isn't an XP problem.

I've used computers since 40mb harddrive was huge, mouse was luxury and
printers made more noise than food processors. I know my way around a QEMM setup, and I'm finished in January with my Network Designer education.
and I got an XP MCP. (going to take MCSA and MSCE in January)

So. please believe me. this isn't the famous "Oh.. damn.. all my icons are strange. wtf" bug

This thing only affects the My Computer icon. and ONLY that one. set's it to 8 bit. a quick change from/to or whatever and back to 32 fixes it.

but it's still annoying.

I've used computers since 40mb harddrive was huge, mouse was luxury and
printers made more noise than food processors. I know my way around a QEMM setup, and I'm finished in January with my Network Designer education.
and I got an XP MCP. (going to take MCSA and MSCE in January)

I don't want to sound mean, though it will sound like that, but with your experience please tell us HOW Dosbox is doing this and why it happens on some people with XP and not to others. This sounds much more like an issue with XP and drivers that gets TRIGGERED by Dosbox but not caused by it.

Completely agree with Dominus. Thinking that DOSBox is the root of that behaviour is just silly. Now, with your great education (Ahem...), i'm sure it would take you mere seconds to find the exact reason for the behaviour, and fix it, right? So what are you complaining about?

Sorry about sounding like an idiot. My "Helpdesk's about to treat you like an idiot" defense mechanism kicked in.

I have no clue what so ever why this is happening. I deal with networking, not programing =) (not that I can't program. I'm just far from an expert)

I got an ATi card and DirectX and ATi drivers are ofc updated.

and it's not the normal icon problem. the icon is infact in 8bit everywhere my computer is referenced to. not just the desktop. even inside other programs.

If dosbox has some how triggered a bug in XP or if it's a bug in dosbox it self doesn't seem to me like a big difference. dosbox is resposible for this happening. and it started after I upgraded to 0.72

and before ppl start hating me 😉

NO. I'm not demanding a fix.
NO. I'm not complaining.
NO. I'm not really a complete moron
YES. I do love dosbox 😀

I just commented on a possible bug, and got a little annoyed how fast it was dismissed.

Try replacing the sdl.dll with an older one, and/or compile dosbox and hack
out some functions (stuff in GUI_StartUp()), and/or set some SDL env vars
like SDL_VIDEODRIVER=windib/directx

dosbox is resposible for this happening

How do you know it's *responsipble* ? As noted above it seems to be
what triggers it. There's surely no "hey let's corrupt the xyz icon" code
inside dosbox, promised.

Geez... Sorry I said anything.

A change in dosbox somehow inadvertently resulted in one (seemingly) random icon on the desktop to change to 8bit.

Is that better? so much better than saying "dosbox made my icon look funny"

Remind me to never report any bugs in dosbox. In case I get a case of temporary insanity and get compelled to do so.

So.... You are into networking, not programming. Say I attach a faulty switch to your network and it randomly emits packets with an invalid header into your network. And the next thing you notice is that one of your routers starts rebooting 3 times a day.

Who is responsible for this happening? The switch for injecting invalid packets in the network, or the firmware in the router for not verifying the checksum in the packet header?

Remind me to never report any bugs in dosbox. In case I get a case of temporary insanity and get compelled to do so.

Well, we DO have an attitude but it was mostly kept in check until you tried to show off with your experience. That, I can give you as a reminder, is what gets people riled up, when the experienced user than doesn't want to give in to the general consensus. As pointed out it's not Dosbox and if you looked at wd's reply, it is not actually Dosbox doing something but most likely SDL (which gets used by Dosbox). And again it's not a bug in Dosbox, neither in SDL but a bug somewhere in the display driver and XP which gets TRIGGERED by SDL. YES, you only get to see it when you use Dosbox but if you'd use other applications that use SDL you'd probably get the same behaviour (with that SDL version). Your insisting on it being a Dosbox bug makes people behave like that.
To get back on track you could try wd's suggestion to see if the problem still shows when you use the different environment settings.

MiniMax wrote:

So.... You are into networking, not programming. Say I attach a faulty switch to your network and it randomly emits packets with an invalid header into your network. And the next thing you notice is that one of your routers starts rebooting 3 times a day.

Who is responsible for this happening? The switch for injecting invalid packets in the network, or the firmware in the router for not verifying the checksum in the packet header?

I see your point. even though in your scenario it's a switch being added to working system. but here it's dosbox being added to a working XP system.

But I get your point.

Dominus wrote:

It is not actually Dosbox doing something but most likely SDL (which gets used by Dosbox). And again it's not a bug in Dosbox, neither in SDL but a bug somewhere in the display driver and XP which gets TRIGGERED by SDL. YES, you only get to see it when you use Dosbox but if you'd use other applications that use SDL you'd probably get the same behaviour (with that SDL version).

but can it be the drivers? I mean. the guy on top is using nvidia. and I'm using Ati. DirectX bug then? or is it an SDL bug ?

Since I've noticed dosbox being shipped as part of the sierra classic collections that I bought, your already going commercial with dosbox, so getting feedback on small things like this and finding a solution to it is perhaps a good idea. Cuz paying endusers aren't going to care if you say it's MS or SDL's fault. I don't realy care at all as I know it's not dangerous, and it doesn't bother me. I just wanted to say "Hey.. I got that problem too." when I noticed the thread.

your already going commercial with dosbox

Definitely not, sierra didn't even bother to contact Qbix/Harekiet if and
how dosbox could be used.

DirectX bug then? or is it an SDL bug ?

I've already posted what you're supposed to do, won't repeat it.

wd wrote:

Definitely not, sierra didn't even bother to contact Qbix/Harekiet if and
how dosbox could be used.

Ouch... had you used GNU GPLv3 instead of GPLv2 you would have been protected against that. as GPLv3 would have required them to make all software bundled together with the GPLv3 licensed software free also.

I've already posted what you're supposed to do, won't repeat it.

Thank you for taking the time to try to fix it. But as I said. it doesn't really bother me. I just tried to be helpful. Something that ended quite badly with me feeling like an ass, that's being stoned to death by an angry mob. 😉

Chaos wrote:

I see your point. even though in your scenario it's a switch being added to working system. but here it's dosbox being added to a working XP system.

And the Moon is circling the Earth (random comment while we are stating the obvious). Yes, you added DOSBox to a working system, but an application should not be able to create random changes to your desktop.

An PC operating system, and a router firmware, should protect itself against internal failures when presented with errornous external data. If DOSBox (or one of its many library routines like SDL, MSVCRT, ...) makes a call to DirectX, or to some GUI component responsible for the desktop, with errornous data, the operating system should throw up an exception and not blindly go ahead and perform the requested operation and corrupt its own data.

Chaos wrote:

Ouch... had you used GNU GPLv3 instead of GPLv2 you would have been protected against that. as GPLv3 would have required them to make all software bundled together with the GPLv3 licensed software free also.

Really Chaos, you should limit yourself to networking, because everytime you open your mouth here, you look even more a fool. Please check the date when Sierra decided to package DOSBox with their games. Then check the date when GPLv3 was finalized. And then explain to us how GPLv3 could have been used.

Secondly, your understanding of how the GPL works is flawed if you think that bundling proprietary with GPL'ed software require all the code to be made free.

Thank you for taking the time to try to fix it. But as I said. it doesn't really bother me. I just tried to be helpful.

Being helpful is actually appreciated, you only triggered attitude with your attitude. If you'd take time to test this fix or workaround (which would have taken less time than writing your last two posts) we'd already have an answer for the next person who has this problem. This would be really helpful.