One solution to this is AltMove which is a program that allows you to press the ALT key and then left click the problem window and move it up until you can see the missing buttons.

We’ve had similar problems in previous versions of Windows and knew that the answer was to clear the icon cache. Here’s how you do it in Windows 7:

• Close all Explorer windows and applications
• Press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to open Windows Task Manager
• Click the Processes tab and locate Explorer.exe on the list of processes
• Right-Click on Explorer.exe and select End Process
• Click File and New Task (Run) and type CMD and click OK
• In the Command Prompt window type each of these lines – pressing Enter/Return after each line:cd %userprofile%\AppData\Local

  del iconcache.db

  exit

• Now back in Task Manager Click File and New Task (Run) and type explorer.exe and click OK – Your icons should now be back to their correct icon.

It seemed that to get a desktop icon to open you had to click once to select it then double-click to open it (in effect making a double-click a triple-click).
I then found if I played around with the visual performance settings i could fix it.

Here’s what I did to fix it in my case:

1. Right click My Computer and select Properties
2. Click Advanced System Settings on the left
3. Click the Advanced tab
4. Under Performance Click Settings
5. On the Visual Effects tab ucheck ‘Animate controls and elements inside windows’

After installing WAMP the PC was still running at normal speed with WAMP running but whenever we tried to access a simple website we had set up there was a 4 or 5 second lag before the page was displayed.

We were using a simple html file to test it with so that ruled out there being a problem with PHP or MySQL in WAMP so it was just Apache that were were finding slow to access – either locally or through the other Windows 7 PC.

I thought it may be Windows firewall and when I shut the firewall down then requests to Apache speeded up to normal speed. Obviously running with the firewall down isn’t ideal so I thought it might be related to a problem I had using localhost on Vista.

Eventually I found disabling IPv6 on the WAMP PC’s network adapter fixed the problems. We don’t need to run IPv6 and running both IPv4 and IPv6 along with Windows firewall and Apache must cause a bottleneck somewhere.

To remove this sync partnership you need to edit the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SyncMgr\Handlers

Find the branch that refers to Microsoft SQL Server and delete it. Sync Center should then not start up again at reboot (unless you have have other Sync Partnerships).

For some reason in Vista and Windows 7 localhost doesn’t work out of the box. To get it working you have to add this line to the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file:

127.0.0.1      locahost

Now the hosts file is a Windows system file so the only way Windows will allow you to edit the file is if you do it as Administrator. To do this click Start and type CMD in the search box, when Windows shows cmd.exe right-click it and click run as administrator then when the DOS box opens type:

edit c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Then add the 127.0.0.1 localhost line and save and close the file.  Then localhost should work as it did in XP.