I came home to “computer woes” yesterday evening. Certainly my favorite thing after a long day of working on computers is to then work on my home computer.
I jest, of course.
Anyhow, our Vista machine — which is typically rock-solid — was no longer booting into the OS. Before booting Windows at all, however, the box was giving some memory errors, which led me to take a gander at the RAM we have installed — (4) 512mb sticks. This particular box needs the RAM installed in pairs, so I yanked out the first pair, booted, received the same errors, yanked the second set of RAM, replaced the original set, booted again, and all was well. Booted in Windows, tinkered around, turned the machine off again, and tried the “bad” sticks of RAM once again. The errors returned, so it appears that I’ve found the culprit. Groovy. For $25 at NewEgg, I can purchase a replacement gig of RAM and be done with it.
Back at the desktop, I notice something strange: green check marks on the corner of many of my files – and typically Word docs, PDF files, etc.. What’s that all about? Now I’m really irritated, and I want to get to the bottom of this.
This day in age, “searching” is your friend, and I’m surprised at 1) how often folks don’t do this, and 2) how truly poor some folks are at using a search engine. Heck, even I fall prey to this sometimes as my friend Swannman totally schooled me by quickly finding info that I couldn’t find. (Check the “comments” section!)
A quick bit of searching on Google pointed me to a *potential* issue with Mozy, the home/online backup service that we use. I don’t know how (or why) anything would’ve changed, but it may be that Mozy was running (backing up our data) when our computer tanked. Who knows.
So… I opened Mozy and clicked the “configure” button…
…then I selected the Options tab…
…and finally checked the ‘Disable Icon Overlays in Windows Explorer’ option.
Voila! No more annoying, green check marks.
Sweet, sweet nectar.
Y.I.P.C.A.N.J.O 
thanks so much for your post. i came home the other day to this annoying issue. i couldn’t figure out what it was. but a quick google search pointed me to you. mozy is great, but i can do without the check marks covering my icons. thanks again.
You’re more than welcome! 🙂
Me too! Thanks for the info on the wacky green check marks. That was too easy.
Me too!
I’m so glad people take the time to make posts like this. You do a great service.
thanks for this tip!
Thank you so much for this tip! I have been looking at these stupid green check marks for a couple of months.
Mike
thanks so much!!!
Thanks so much. I hated the green check marks and, even more, that I couldn’t figure out why they were there. Peace, at last.
Like the rest, I too, suddenly had these green check marks on many icons on my desktop and files in folders.
It was good to find out that Mozy was the source of these check marks — I opted to leave the icon overlay on, but at least now I know why those check marks are there.
Thanks so much for helping us with this.
Ed
This seems to also be the same with Norton backup. The green check is nearly the same, but slightly more square.
It is the same for Norton Security suite goto the settings and on the backup setting turn off back up overlays and reboot and gone yay cheers