Crazy Screen Saver (Bubbles screen saver became super fast)

Question

I have Windows 7 with the generic Bubbles screen saver which usually works fine.

However, several times in the last couple of months I got back after a while being afk to see it went insane, and the bubbles were going at crazy speed.

Today I took a short video of this: (converted to gif)

After touching the mouse Windows resumed as if nothing has happened. Memory and CPU usage were all normal. Nothing was stuck, frozen, or out of the ordinary.

What can cause this weird behavior of the screen saver?

Unlike the case in Windows 7 Desktop Screensaver (bubbles) going very fast, in my case this is not consitent, and happens only once in a while, still can't see any pattern or a way to reproduce. I did not change any hardware.

Answer 1

To reinitialize the Bubbles screen-saver, try this :

1. Launch regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Screensavers\Bubbles
3. Open Bubbles
4. You will see two sub-keys : Screen 1 and Screen 2
5. If the key Bubbles and its sub-keys contain any data besides (Default), delete this data

If you wish to conserve the above data before deleting it, right-click the Bubbles key and choose Export.

I note that users were having this same problem since the early days of Windows, so it may be a very old bug that was never fixed by Microsoft.