Graphical corruption in high-dpi mode with Aero enabled.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack Tripper
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J

Jack Tripper

If i increase my dpi to anything above 96 dpi (and reboot) i will get
graphical corruption after a few minutes. The corruption is limited to
"glass" areas.

For example the start menu may appear as a sheet of pure glass. Buttons on
the taskbar, could appear all mached together. The Alt+Tab panel won't paint
itself. Ossasionally an entire window's client area will be transparent,
rather than painting anything.

If i kill and restart Explorer it fixes itself, for a few minutes. If i
disable Aero (switch to Windows Vista Basic these) it's fine. If i kill the
DWM.exe (which disables Aero) it's fine. If i set it back to 96dpi and
reboot, it's fine.

nVidia GeForce 6600GT.
Any drivers you like, Windows Update's WHQL, nVidia direct, same problem.

It's obviously a problem with the video card itself that Microsoft needs to
work around. (it only happens at non-96dpi mode). MS is doing something that
nVidia doesn't like or support. i have screenshots, if anyone really cares.

i know this is one of those things that i won't be able to get fixed for me,
but is a low priority fix that would take better part of a year to come out.
i seem to be the only person on the internet having the problem (according to
Google). At least now it's documented.

i just hope that somone in the WPF team (e.g.
http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/) might come across this post, and think
to himself "Anything other than 96dpi? Ohhh wait, you know what it could
be....."
 
nVidia GeForce 6600GT.
Any drivers you like, Windows Update's WHQL, nVidia direct, same problem.
Click to expand...

Got the GeForce 6800GT for Christmas yesterday, same problem.

Graphical corruption if with Aero enabled and i run in high dpi (108dpi)
 
i think i've isolated the glorified notepad program that is managed to
corrupt WPF/Aero/Glass. i've had the program not run for 2 weeks and had no
problems.

This morning i ran the program and within 10 minutes Start Menu and Taskbar
were unusable. i killed the program, restarted explorer, and i'll go for
another few days with the program not running.

If the problems then reappear after i try loading it again i'l have found
the culprit.

The next question is how a 10 year old text editor can corrupt Vista's
display.

My next step would have been to install a downloaded copy of Vista onto a
virtual pc, but Aero cannot work on a Trio64.
 
i have found a program that will cause all explorer windows (desktop,
taskbar, start menu, Alt+Tab, non-client areas) to become graphically
corrupt. The problem only happens with "Aero" enabled, and you're running in
non-96 dpi.

It's impressive that what is essentially a text editor program can corrupt
explorer. Obviously the program is doing something bad - but it should not be
able to lead to a denial of service against my computer.

If you're malicious, feel free to see what the app is doing, and reproduce it.

Screenshots:
http://hereford.homeip.net/Pictures/Vista - graphical corruption high dpi.png
http://hereford.homeip.net/Pictures/Vista - graphical corruption high dpi
2.png
http://hereford.homeip.net/Pictures/Vista - Graphical corruption high dpi
4.png

Steps to Reproduce the Problem
1. Enable Windows Desktop Composition (Aero)
2. Change system to a dpi setting other than 96 dpi (e.g. 108dpi, 120dpi),
and reboot for the changes to take effect
3. Run the problematic software (Action Outline 1.6 -
http://hereford.homeip.net/actionoutline.rar)
4. Wait 30 minutes.

i've had colleagues reproduce the problem on their own home machines.

Now that there is a reproducable way to corrupt explorer.exe, i'm sure the
guys who wrote WPF would like to see it. They might want to see how a process
running as standard user is able to corrupt another process.
 
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