At work we use tweaked Windows Server 2003 on all our workstations. And lately strange thing started happening to my Windows. Under heavy load some windows stopped refreshing. If I closed some programs the problem went away and resurfaced after couple of hours or even days. It also helped if I disabled some Firefox extensions. I tried to be systematic, but I could figure out what caused the problem.
It was super-annoying and it ate my nerves really hard. Today I actually remove my complete Firefox profile but it happened again. It was a clear signal I had to use big guns. After some sniffing around I found a process with extremely high "GDI Objects" count called WISPTIS.EXE. I simply killed it at everything works great again!
I did some googling and I quickly found out that Win2003 SP1 installs "Handwriting Recognition" feature and the OneNote uses it although it's not running on Tablet PC (unfortunately). It's a killer combination for a huge GDI leak.
I also found a really easy fix. Just go to "Control Panel / Regional Settings / Languages / Details..." and remove "Handwriting Recognition". While you are here you can also get rid of "Speech Recognition". Does anyone even use this?