Cannot set the background of Windows XP, caused by Logmein

I help my mother out by using a product call Logmein to remote login to her machine. As long as the network is working, I can fix most of the problem she has at the other end. Recently, she encountered a problem that me stump for a long time. Apparently, her background picture on her PC disappeared. I login using Logmein to fix the problem but no matter which picture I select, it won’t appear as a background.

Normally, this sort of thing would be either a policy or registry issue. Since she is using XP Home, there are really no group policies. Playing around with Regedit, I was able to trace the cause down to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoActiveDesktop

The key was set to 1. I deleted the key and reboot. Much to my surprise, it recreated the key and set it back to 1. After hours of playing around, I discovered that this is caused by Logmein itself. At some point recently, Logmein updated with a new version and with that update changed a setting where the desktop background is turned off while I am logged into Logmein. The way it does this is to set NoActiveDesktop to 1 when logmein is on and set it back to zero when logmein client is disconnected. The machine must have crashed when I was using Logmein, causing the computer to be stuck in a picture-less state.

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