So, I upgraded my Dell XPS M1210 to Vista last week.  The whole process took about 8-9 hours; a whole lot longer than it took on our Dell XPS 710 quad core machine.  The results were great, though.  Just about everything works perfectly. 

One little glitch, though, was that I couldn't change the wallpaper!  I could change the color of the background, but whenever I would try to change the wallpaper it just wouldn't do anything.  No errors, no dialogs, no action.  Nothing.

So, a quick web search resulted in a page that talks about problems changing the background in XP after certain spyware has been removed. Well, before the upgrade I had run Windows Defender to remove some spyware that had gotten on to my system somehow (odd, since I've mostly just been using the Sony UX390N). 

I followed the instructions, which boil down to removing the "wallpaper" key found at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.  After removing it, the problem went away instantly.  The key was actually set to an empty string, too.  At least the location of the key hasn't changed from XP to Vista. ;)

(NOTE: Yes, I know this post is backdated.  But it didn't seem worthy of a full front page post.  Sorry for the awkward dating.  It was actually posted the morning of April 3, 2007.)

Posted by Shane on April 2, 2007 8:07 AM | Permalink