Ghost Image or screen retention help?

[Mardoin69]

Ok, so... I have an issue some tech savvy person might be able to help me with?
Quite a while back, I noticed this little white line sort of visible in the background on my monitor--when viewing darker screens, like in this discussion board for example. Originally, I thought I had a faulty monitor with some pixels going bad. It got a little more noticeable over time. Finally, I decided to swap out with another monitor I have. Lo and behold, there's that little white line again... even though it's a different monitor. Only, this monitors contrast and brightness settings (along with color gradients etc.) is a bit different and I can actually see a lot more to the image.

Guess what it is?! A picture of a Swallower attacking my party in Wizardry 8. Like WTF? I'm pretty sure I didn't walk away and leave my monitor on for hours or anything like that... to end up with screen burn in. But, this is a different monitor anyway. So, the image is somehow in my PC's background very faintly and must be stuck in some part of Windows itself? I thought possibly somehow stuck into memory of the GPU but, I completely wiped Nvidia from my system--from Safe Mode--and did a Clean install of newest drivers. Still here. Any help?

I looked online but, couldn't find anything that talked about this particular issue. Everything in the results was just talking about Screen burn in... except for some reference to contact Intel Support if not Screen burn in--which basically didn't get me anywhere.

[Mardoin69]

Well, I've done a ton of maintenance on my system and even did my best to flush the gpu memory... still have ghost pic in background on dark background windows. But, only one's that are more gray than black... like in the Steam discussions window and occasionally in a game or video if it's more gray than black at the time. It's freaking weird... wiped free space all drives, cleared Pagefile, reset memory (system and gpu) but, haven't flushed cpu graphics cuz I have it disabled in the BIOS. That's the only place I can imagine this freeze pic of me playing Wiz 8 could be living unless it's somehow embedded into Windows Background pic choices or something weird like that. But, theoretically, since I have CPU (Intel) graphics disabled, it shouldn't be able to render a pic into memory. It's a freaky mystery that I can't find anything online about and never seen this issue before. I've completely scanned (during boot-up even) for any virus behavior with nothing found. I'm thinking maybe at this point, it maybe time for a complete system wipe and re-install of Windows... ugh.

Edit: Ok, so... in case anyone else runs into this problem too.
If you notice, select any game and go to 'Discussions' you'll see a faint background image for the game. It's dependent upon the game. Like in this forum, I get that pic of Wizardry 8... the Swallower attacking the party. In other games discussions, it's something else. You might not see it depending how you have contrast and brightness settings for your monitor. My problem was this Wiz 8 image showing in other places besides this steam Discussion page. Fault was the Steam client and I had to clear caches + uninstall, re-install the steam client... which seems to have fixed it. Was just a really weird issue to come across.

[Pebble]

I see the swallower too, now. I don't think I'd have ever noticed without this thread. 😄

[Matt]

It's quite funny that everyone who read that thread probably had no idea how to help you (that was my case), while having the exact same picture you described on their screen but not seeing it.

Congratz to you for fixing this, and thanks for sharing the workaround.

[Mardoin69]

Yeah, funny thing is, with my other monitor, there is less grayscale on it--blacks are more black / less gray so, couldn't really see the image in background so much. For that monitor I could just notice the white line ghosting along the left side. Wasn't till I swapped with this monitor and the pic in background really stood out. So, I probably would of always just thought I had a monitor pixellation issue if I had stuck with the old one.