Vista - File menu open/close issue

Appologies in advance if I'm being too long winded or not providing enough detail (1st post).

I'm running Vista Home Premium 32bit (sp2) on an HP Pavillion dv6700 laptop. The issue I'm having is that the "XP style" File menu bar keeps randomly opening up and then closing whenever I have any Office product, IE, or the explorer open. I've never "turned on" this option so no clue why this started to do this a little over a week ago. Initailly I found that it got worse (more frequently opening/closing the menu bar) when I had my external hard drives (EHDs) connected but at this point it's near constant without them connected and it's locking up the programs so that I can't type or click on anything.

I've not installed any new software in months; and the only downloads I've taken/installed were files from trusted sites and several system updates.

My 1st impression was either a virus or a system update conflict from either or both HP or Windows; the latter has not been an uncommon issue. My anitvirus is up-to-date & a complete scan turned up nothing, even on my EHDs. I've gone back twice using the restore points; the 2nd time going back over 2 weeks prior to the start of this issue. I'm out of ideas short of doing a complete reinstall from my back-up partition. I'm hoping someone might have some ideas or suggestions to help resolve this issue.

Thanks!

If you are talking about the menu bar in windows explorer, in the orgainize menu under layout click menu bar to keep it in place. Does that stop it showing?

Hello Ingwalde, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Since you did not have the menu bar turned on, it may have been opening if you had pressed the ALT key. It would then go away quickly if you clicked the mouse or pressed any other key. If you find the menu bar helpful, you should turn it on as Frostmourne suggested as well to not have it flickering on you like this.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thank you both for your suggestions. This actually helped me diagnose the problem...we'll call it family member interferrence.

By turning on the menu bar I could see that it appeared to be constantly "pressing" the Alt key...making me think I had a hardware issue. Then I realized that my wireless keyboard was still attached. So, I went to the other room where the keyboard was and sure enough, someone had left a book on top of the keyboard. Removed book, problem solved.

Thank you both again...made my day!

You're welcome Ingwalde.

LOL, I'm happy to hear that you found the culprit. I suppose that you could still call it a hardware problem.