Hello everyone,
I recently bought Sanitarium but, even though I feel like it, I'm not here to boast it. Ever since I first launched the game yesterday I've been encountering a graphical glitch that seems to be related to colour depth or something similar. Basically, shadows are pixelated and sport a sort of psychedelic rainbow gradient.
I attached a screen shot of this 'pixelated layer' to help understand what the problem is and, possibly, figure out its cause. Please note that my game isn't black. The 'Print Screen' key conveniently grabbed this glitchy layer instead of the whole thing. I assume that's for the same reason that one can't take screenshots of videos played in BS Player or other media players.
I have updated my system's drivers, all of them. To double check, I did it again this morning. I tried running the game in all of the compatibility modes available for Windows XP but the problem persists.
I hope you can help.
-- poltergeist92.
EDIT (15/05/2010):
I haven't been around for a while and I'm sorry for that, but as ikantspelwurdz said, having a Windows... well, window open in the background solves the problem.
The reason why the game behaves this way (at least in my case) is because I have all this desktop-clutter removal type software installed. Stuff like Samurize, Fences and RocketDock. I figured out that if I closed down RocketDock and hid my Fences windows the game ran fine and without a problem.

Thank you whichblokewasi. I was using the kill explorer.exe method, but I had to resart my computer every time I stopped playing. This little batch did it for me :)

Non of those tricks work for me under Windows 7 64 Bits with Radeon 5850.

Thank you whichblokewasi ! This solution is working perfectly well on my Seven 64 bits (with NVidia gtx760 MSI). The horrible graphic glitch is definitely gone. Your solution is THE SOLUTION.

thanks a lot, that really helped me with the issue as well. HIGH 5!!! :-D