When playing Spider Solitaire and Hearts, bits and pieces of extraneous cards appear on the screen around the active playing cards. I am unable to rid the screen of these numerous, annoying pieces until the game is complete. The computer is an AMD Athlon XP2600+ 2.09GHz, with 1024MB RAM running Windows XP Professional, with two hard drives: C (40GB) and D (120GB).

Well I think we can rule out that your system is underpowered to play Spider Solitaire and Hearts, given the high performance machine you own! There could be a number of causes, ranging from a conflicting program/process to a graphics problem. Firstly, let’s check whether or not the problem is related to a program/process conflict. Restart your computer and once Windows has started, press CTRL-ALT-DEL. Click the ‘Processes’ tab. Try closing all non-essential processes. Generally, you can safely close all processes which are running under your user name. To sort the list by user name, click the ‘User Name’ table heading. Do not close any processes running under other user names (e.g., SYSTEM) as these are generally essential Windows services. Once you have finished closing the processes, disable any virus scanners and try running the games again. If the problem ceases, then it will just be a matter of elimination to discover which process is causing the problem. If the problem persists, restart your computer in order to restart all the processes you closed in the last step.

The second possibility is there could be a graphics/video card issue. Try reducing the graphics acceleration. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’. Switch to ‘Classic View’ and open the ‘Display’ control panel. In the window that appears, click the ‘Settings’ tab and then the ‘Advanced’ button. In the next Window, click ‘Troubleshoot’. Note the position of the ‘Hardware acceleration:’ slider. Then, move the slider one notch to the left. Click OK. Click OK. Check if the problem persists. Keep repeating this procedure until either the problem ceases, or the slider is at the bottom setting and the problem continues (at which point you should reset the slider to its original value). It may also be worthwhile trying to download the latest drivers for your video card. These can be found at the manufacturer’s website.

Another, but unorthodox method of working around some problems with Spider Solitaire in particular, is to open the game help (’Help’ menu > ‘Contents’) and minimise the help window then continue to play the game as usual. See if this works for you!