Bizarre rogue image

[dunsurfin]

This has happened before but not for a few months and I thought it was an isolated incident then.

SL 5.x x86 K fully update 2.6.38 kernel. Intel Core2 duo 2997, Nvidia GeForce 8500, Dell monitor 1920x1080.

After running the latest update to KDE 4.6.2 and rebooting I started Firefox (4) and a picture appeared in my Google home page. The picture is from a search I did a few weeks ago for pine shelving. Clearing the cache makes no difference, the picture cannot be captured by normal methods (I had to use a camera). It appears on top of most programmes that I start and will not react to any input. As far as the rest of the PC is concerned it doesn't exist. The only way I got rid of it was with a reboot.
I'm unable to post the images as "the board attachment quota has been reached". I will put them somewhere else and edit this post later.
Edit: Images here: http://www.sabayonspoiler.plus.com/file ... age.tar.gz (remove "spoiler")

[Fitzcarraldo]

I had the same problem a few weeks ago, but unfortunately cannot remember whether it was on my main laptop (KDE 4.6.1; ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650; ati-drivers; Entropy not installed: managed using Portage) or on my nettop (KDE 4.6.1; NVIDIA ION; nvidia-drivers; mostly managed using Entropy). So I can't pin it down to a particular thing. Whatever the cause, it went away. Since then I've upgraded a few packages on the laptop, and upgraded everything on my nettop via Entropy. My guess is xorg-server or the video driver, but it could also be a problem with KDE itself I suppose.

[dunsurfin]

As you say, it does go away but my PC needs a reboot to do it. I can remember that the other time it happened I had also been looking at the Wilkinson website and, in each case, it was a separate window (probably a zoom window) that caused it. In my previous life as a Windows user I knew how to empty the Java cache but am not sure how to do it with Linux. I wonder if it may be a malformed bit of Java that is doing it.

Edit: Found the Java control panel in "Utilities" to clear the Java cache.

[chasha420]

Hi, your incident sounds interesting. Could you please upload the image to an image uploading site? http://min.us/

Also, I had a question: Why were you not able to take a screenshot of the image?

Thanks a lot.

[dunsurfin]

I have uploaded the images and provided a url for them - just remove the word "spoiler" and you will get the images in tar.gz form.
Any screenshot or other image capture refused to capture the rogue image. It's as though it were in a separate gui.

[chasha420]

Hmmm, the image looks interesting...but why does it have to be a cigarette company?!

Probably an adware type of thing going on.

[dunsurfin]

Wilkinsons is a chain of hardware shops and I had been searching their website for pine shelving. The image is one that I'd seen on the website. One point I forgot to mention is that when I rebooted, the image remained on my screen after the log-off until just before the system shut down.

[dunsurfin]

Just had another look and see what you mean chasha420