Active desktop not displaying fully..........?

[tosca925]

I have configure Active Dektop in GPO to display a background of my choice. Problem i have is the background only displays about the top 5 cm of the screen when a user logs on, if i hit refresh it loads fully instantly.

I have kept the file size of the background as small as poss 161kb i think the current one is. At anyone time i have over 400 users logging on at the same time on the hour could this be a problem?

Can any one suggest anything else.?

[sahmeepee]

If it works OK during quiet spells it sounds that way.. maybe try telling Active Desktop to grab the image from a URL on a web server rather than a UNC path to a share. Not sure it'll help, but it could be worth a go. As a side effect it'll also give you nice web logs telling you what time a machine was logged on to.

[Geoff]

I've had this, it was caused by a corrupt image file. We eventually tracked it down to a flaky switch.

[SpuffMonkey]

Tell 'em to press F5 to refresh - works for us.

[tarquel]

not seen this yet with my setup.

lol geoff - u saying it was the image or the switch ....or both?

tosca925 - jpg or bmp? if bmp, then try it as a jpg [or vice versa ]

Try saving with lower settings if jpg to reduce the file size - not sure what size mine is

Regards
N.

[tosca925]

@tarquel
Its a .jpg i use at the moment so i will give it a shot with a bmp when i get chance.

See if you can find out what size your file is?

[Geoff]

lol geoff - u saying it was the image or the switch ....or both?

Switch was randomly corrupting data on the network. Thus it corrupted the jpg the first time I uploaded it to the server. Then when clients loaded it as their background it corrupted it more. The situation was confused by the fact that loading the image in an editor didn't show it as corrupt, it loaded fine!

[Frazer]

Lol gotta love those kind of problems(!)
We have a domain computer script for startup:
if not exist c:\wallpaper
md c:\wallpaper
copy \\server\folder\background.bmp c:\wallpaper

Then set your policy to c:\wallpaper\background.bmp
This will reduce the amount of times the server is accessed for the wallpaper (only once per new pc!)

Edit: I tend to use bmps for wallpaper so I can avoid turning on active desktop (its never played nicely in the past, right from the start in win9x!)