Windows 10 - Ghost bubbles
Suddenly the ghost bubbles started appearing, with feverish flickering of cursor, not able to click anything, had to do hard restart and the bubbles disappeared. Happened a couple of times, infrequent.

I thought my PC is virus infected. Upon search, many users reported the same. Looks like some windows update messed up the graphic drivers :(

Do you have a touchscreen on your device? I’ve seen Windows 10 freak out and think that the touchscreen was getting tons of touch input when nothing was really happening 😑

Best OS ever!

@zymk Yes, it has (Dell touchscreen laptop), the MS support portal suggested to uninstall touchscreen device driver and restart, but even after restart, the problem persisted. When I did the hard reset (i dread to lose / corrupt files / drive), the system started normally. However, it has occurred earlier too. Just kept it aside and using Ubuntu for the time being.

@zymk I think you solved my problem!!

When I read your statement "Windows 10 freak out and think that the touchscreen was getting tons of touch input when nothing was really happening", I got a hint.

I primarily use my external monitor, so the laptop screen was pretty dirty uniformly. Today only I cleaned the touchscreen. At the corner of the screen (just near bezel), there an organic smudge left out. Cleaned that too and restarted, not ghost bubbles yet.

Do you think that organic smudge was the cause, I mean Windows 10 was thinking somebody touching it all the time?

Man, this is freaking me out.

Windows 7 bubbles screensaver coming through

That's neat HID driver bug u got there. Fvck

I love how Microsoft does not care to check if the update wil break something ...

@Floydian fuck man we have been here for a while now and even with that I ha e no clue if you are being serious or not

For now, I have disabled touch screen (from device manager), using it for about 1 hour, no issues.

@irene I am not the only one with hilarious cause of the bug, when I was searching for the cause of the ghost bubbles on touch screens using Windows 10, found these gems on support portals:

- "As long as my touchscreen remains in one spot I rarely have difficulty with it. However, the minute I put my hands on the sides to move my screen, those little bubbles start dancing up and down the left side of my screen and starts opening all these web pages."

- "Each time these bubbles started on my screen I would simply close my laptop cover for a second and re-open. Sometimes the bubbles would stop immediately and sometimes they would not so I would re-close again. "

- "The orbs strike when least expected. I haven't been able to decode their message but I'm convinced it is intelligent life"

- "when I used an aftermarket charger and not the one that came with the laptop."

@irene one more :)

- "I noticed that this really annoying problem only happens when my computer is in a specific location and plugged in. If I unplug it the problem goes away. I have repeated this several times and though I cannot explain it, it is really happening. I cannot use my laptop in my kitchen while plugged in. "

@ajit555 My younger sister had a lenovo with a touchscreen that originally shipped with Windows 8 and somehow (still scratching my head about this) the windows 8 touch driver was solid. No issues ever. Then we updated her to 10 and everything went to shit.

But this was also a really old model so Lenovo probably never had intentions for Win10 on the box so the drivers were just slapped together.

One thing I would check if you are running on a dell is to make sure that the firmware of the system is totally patched and up to date. I recently worked on a clients system that would randomly shutdown. No event log, no crash dump. It would just shutdown like someone pulled the power. This was a laptop so there was a battery that should prevent that kind of symptom. I made sure everything was patched to the teeth at the OS level. Still had issues. Finally ran the dell supportassist tool and found the bios were way behind current. Updated and the issue has been stable for about 2 months

@zymk Thanks for the suggestion (Dell / SupportAssist). Yes, I run SupportAssist almost once everyweek and all the drivers seems to be up-to-date. Hardware scan has no issues too. For now, I have simply disabled touchscreen as not using it much. No issues untill now (almost 4 hrs of usage).

@ajit555 https://downloads.dell.com/servicea...

Hopefully this helps out. Dell manufactures a great deal of the hw that goes into their systems in-house and they often modify the hell out of 3rd party Drivers for other components that go into their builds. So I would definitely check drivers/firmware using their tools.

Back when I was a helpdesk peon we found issues with installing the Intel created RST (rapid store technology) drivers on a new model of laptops our company started using. We ended up having to re-roll our images with the dell version of RST which was like 4-5 versions behind. But they modified it somehow to NOT cause “Disk not found” errors on reboots.

@ajit555 sweet! Hopefully things stay stable for you. Sorry that you’re going through that mess with your system :/

@zymk Thanks. Everything seems okay.

@ajit555 Awesome, Hopefully things stay stable. I think we all know just how damn infuriating a finicky system is. Makes you want to go “Office Space” that shit; lol.

@dontbeevil with all the telemetry data they are collecting surely they can expect the edge cases

@dontbeevil most of the time it's a 3th party driver that just happens to break in the update

I also have dell laptop with touch screen. Having same issue. @dontbeevil Could you please confirm, disable touch screen will fix the issue?