Start Button Went Weird

Yesterday... I had a most strange thing happen whilst I was connected to the internet via my dial-up connection to AOL on WINME system.

I only had AOL... Zone Alarm... MSN Messenger... and Yahoo Messenger running at the time.

Anyway, there I was sitting watching the screen, and all of a sudden, the start button started to change before my eyes.

First it went blank and the windows flag logo along with the word Start disappeared. Then a few seconds later a little green icon appeared... it looked like either a little green umbrella or possible a phone handset picture.

I was very concerned because I wasn't using the mouse or keyboard and yet something was happening to the start button on its own.

I then decided to close Yahoo Messenger... I only have one contact in my list and that person was shown off-line. As I did this... the start button went blank again, and then the familiar flag logo reappeared.

I rebooted... ran AdAware and Spybot... no problems showed up... and also rebuilt the icons using TweakUI.

It's been fine since with no problems with any system or file.

Anyone know what could have caused this... is it a known bug in Windows or something. In 5 years of using this computer I've never seen this happen before.