when exiting sof2 multiplayer, my desktop looks lighter, or bleached even. any clues on what causes it or how to get rid of it? it just started to do it a week ago. no hardware or software changes, including no new patches. i also have the latest drivers for the video card.

Athlon 1800 XP+
GeForce 4 Ti 4400
1 gig DDR RAM

It's definitely a video problem. I'm not exactly a guru on this type of thing but basically what happens is, your game sets the brightness of your video card higher when you load it, then when you exit it doesn't change back. Not sure how to get rid of it, try tweaking with your graphics settings in game, or your viedo driver settings.

The white screen goes away after you restart right?  I usually get that white/bleached screen when my game gets an error and I have to quit or it dumps me to the desktop.  But it hasn't happened in a long time.  In fact, it seemed to have stoppped when I got a Ti4600.

it happens when any game isnot shutdown properly, which means it does not finished shutting down the display properly and does not restored the desktop settings.

what drivers are u running, make sure its the latest Offical ones (not betas)

are u running any utitities for ur vid card?

Yes, it does restore fine when I reboot the machine, or even Log off user and log back on.  I am running XP Pro, and I do have the latest official drivers from the Nvidia website.  Weird thing is I haven't changed anything since I got the 1.02 patch, which was some time ago now.  It hasn't been doing it all this time and just started out of the blue.  Weird eh?  I am not running and video utilities or any new programs.  The card works fine in every other game I have and no video quirks in any other application that I can see.  My FPS is still very high, and playing is very enjoyable on this machine.  I do run my brightness setting in-game higher thant he default, but it always used to re-adjust it back down when I got to the desktop.  Now it doesn't.  Oh well, thatnks for the input so far, maybe someone who had the similar problem and figured out a fix will read this.    

how do u exit the game??

esc to main menu and exit
esc exit
console type quit

try each way and see if its the same result

like spike said, its something with the game process.
when it doesnt shut down properly (even though you might think it did), the gamma settings of the game kind of stay with windows. go into your display properties to gamma/brightness settings and then they should be fixed.
 

its just not resetting the gamma and brightness back to default settings like it should.  sounds like a prob with your vid card settings, drivers, or possibly even the game.  i have seen some pretty wierd things happen out of nowhere so i wouldnt feel to bad about it...try rolling back your vid drivers, upping the hertz or refresh rate.  play around a bit.  at the very worst re-install the game.  its not the end of the worls to re-install.  i found that wiping out sof2 and re-instaloing from scratch gets rid of a lot of .tmp (temporary) files that sometimes cause problems.  also it keeps my game running fast as can be.  but thats just me, individual results may vary.  hope this helps.

Thanks guys for all the GREAT advice.  There was a new driver on Nvidia's website that was released on 11/11.  That seems to be doing the trick for me now.  I can exit from Main Menu or directly from game and no bleached screen.  Thanks again for all the help though!