active desktop option doesn't exist in windows XP?

I idiotically thought I could put a nice picture on the desktop of my multimedia machine (winxp sp1), and ever since then I have had terrible performance in my recording software (Sonar 2.0). I know that active desktop was enabled because it must be for the desktop to show a jpeg, right? So I want to turn active desktop off...but no option exists anywhere. Right clicking on the desktop shows no options for active desktop, nor does the display properties. I did some searching on the web, and there was some stuff about registry hacks, which i tried without understanding well, and which had no results at all.

So first, how do I turn off active desktop? And second, what idiocy utterly removes the ability to toggle that feature?

how big is your JPEG?

if it is huge, it will eat up your RAM.

Yeah I turned off the jpeg on the desktop, put the background to a blank color, but I don't think that actually turns active desktop off, does it? I really don't know what active desktop does, other than take nice pictures on the deskop and allow an internet explorer page as your desktop (and destroy your performance). I need to rule this out as an issue for my performance problem, and I want to definitely turn off active desktop to do so.

Since I cannot find the option ANYWHERE, I an very skeptical about whether it is on or off.

active desktop as a principle allows you to have dynamic web content added to your actual desktop.

IMO it is crap but thats just MO.

Okey. But do you know why the option to turn it on or off simply doesn't exist on my winxp machine? It exists on my win2k machine here at work....when i chose a jpeg as a desktop picture it somehow enabled it, but since there is no option anywhere else I simply cannot turn it off.

I guess it's time to reinstall (again)....back to win2k i think. If this turns out to be true (active desktop was ruining my performance and was impossible to turn off), I will be extremely bitter.

I don't know.

I don't ever look for it or use it so maybe someone else may be able to help.

OK, thanks for listening tho.