win7 start button not working with mouse

Hi, my problem is that sometimes my start button (or orb) is unresponsive to the mouse in win7, the mouse works with anything else with no problems at all, but the start button just doesnt do anything, it doesnt change its state if I hover over it with the mouse either.

This usually happens after playing a game or running a full screen app. If I press the win key on my keyboard the start menu appears and then it works fine with the mouse, I can click on the desktop to close it and then a mouse click on the start button will work to bring it back up, until another game or app is used.

I have run a few anti-malware apps and run a full scan with avast, all of which finds no problems, and I've had no luck in searching for a solution.

I hope someone can help as this has had me scratching my head for some time now.

 

How much Ram is in your setup ?? it maybe that your system resources are using a lot of Ram, the next time this happens open task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and see what processes are running.

 

its been been happening on and off all day, I made it happen again by running a game and it reports

CPU floating between 7-10%
39% memory used
and there are no processes that I dont recognize in the list

and my system is a AM3 X3 3.2GHz with 4GB 1333MHz