You can try turning off Windows Theme support. (Options > Preferences > General tab, then uncheck [ ] Enable Windows XP Theme support). It’s worth a try to get you going again.
These sorts of things happen after Windows starts running out of RAM for GUI elements. I've seen this occur when my computer has been on for inordinate amounts of time, say maybe months without a reboot, or if i've had a day of launching dozens of applications dozens of times. A reboot usually solves it. Turning off some of Windows' unnecessary display fanciness can help too.
For some odd reason SONY's software seems to suffer this problem much sooner than other company's software. Maybe their GUIs are much more active and complex. The other funky thing i'll see a lot is for some window form element of another program to show through when i Alt-Tab back to Vegas or Sound Forge. Kinda funny to be reading an email, jump back to Vegas, and see the "Reply to:" address still sitting there in blue on the timeline in the middle of my screen. It won't disappear until i exit Vegas and restart.
I get the slider bars turning black - actually they boot up black - on a semi-regular basis - on all of my systems.
I have one or two gigs of ram, depending on which system we're playing on. All have a NVidia graphics card of some flavour and none get a lot of use besides pure editing/compositing.
I have Windows set to Classic Look, so maybe that's a factor, I don't know. Usually a re-boot or two fixes it, but this has plagued me for a long time - possibly since 6 was released. It's just an annoyance, really. If you fish down there, you can find the edges and do it all blind, if you want to. Basically, I use my mouse wheel anyway, so I just grumble these days, rather than curse.
Guys the first thing I did is follow a few suggestions from you all.
temp fix is the themes. As soon as I switched from classic to xp theme it was gone. I then switched back to classic and it was gone.
Thus I'll conclude that if you have this prob and you need to do work on a main machine or work for quite a bit of time it may be worth it to take the 20 secs to make at least one switch.
My next test will be long term on classic. If I keep getting the problem then I'll also test with other themes.
Hope this helps, thanks for the help for now guys.
That's funny, I was just fiddling with WindowBlinds and came across the same problem. The skins provide a nice alternative and can give Vegas a cooler look and feel. However, I had to ditch the skins because of that stupid horizontal slider in Vegas. It was the only thing it affected. Everything else looked fine.