I've got something annoying that happens to me now and then, and I'm hoping one of you will have a solution.

When I go to control the volume on my computer, I hit an icon down in the lower right corner, and a little control panel pops up, with a sliding volume knob. Perfect - most of the time it works perfectly. However, if I do this too soon after I have turned my computer on in the morning, sometimes my cursor will drag the panel onto the middle of the screen, and try as I might, I can't make it go away.

This morning, it spread out like a deck of cards across a table - I've got seven little panels arcing across the screen. This is more of an annoyance than anything else - if I reboot it will disappear, and sometimes it goes away on its own after about half an hour, but it IS annoying, and if anyone has an easy solution, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

So now it's been about an hour and a half, and some of them have allowed themselves to be dragged down and then they disappear. The main "deck" though, a sort of stack that looks to be maybe ten thick, is not budging. We'll just see how long this lasts.

It disappeared altogether about ten minutes ago, on its own.

What operating system are you using?

When you click the System Tray icon, do you get a panel with only the volume control showing, or does it have other controls there as well?

When you see multiple instances of the panel, have a look in 'Task Manager' to see if more than one process is running that looks related to the sound.

Also have a look to see how many processes are running at Start-up. To do this, type msconfig into the 'Run' box and click OK. Select the Start-up tab in the box that opens up.

When the unmoveable panel(s) are showing, try opening another Window on top of them to cover them up. Are they gone when the Window is closed?

OK, I'll look into that. I have real problems with things not working properly if I try them when the computer first starts up - not just being slow, but malfunctioning. I've got Windows XP, I think.

Opening another window does not cover them up - they just cover up part of the new window. It's just this little box, about an inch and half high, with a sliding volume knob on it.