As we have pointed out previously, you MUST have DWM capable hardware to use the WB 5.5 beta on Vista.

Neil wrote: We are aware that on some machines it takes out explorer either on initial skin apply, or on unload. We are tracking down why this is. Would the machines that have this problem be running the RTM build rather than the RC2 build of Vista?

I finally installed the latest WB beta on Vista RC2 and immediately experienced this problem applying a skin for the first time. Explorer "died" but came back to life after some waiting time. My system rates a "5.1" on the PC Rating, aka: Windows Experience Rating scale.

The current beta should not do this.  As far as we are aware all known explorer crashes are fixed.  What date is your wblind.dll?

A short question: where is the skin sound-disable check?

Currently missing

Neil,

Strange..... when I checked which version I had installed via Stardock Central in Vista, it said Build 5.49a[b].020. SD then updated itself, restarted and it showed version Build 5.49a[b].021 was available. Obviously, I updated and now everything is working fine in Vista RC2 for me.

BTW..... where has the option to apply/not apply skin-included wallpapers gone to?

I was wondering. Is anyone else getting graphical problems or glitches in WB 5.5. I tried it under XP-PRO-SP2 and seems I get little glitches in the graphics here and there. Happens in WB 5.01 and 5.1 (enhanced) as well. I have a ATI Radeon X850 XT PE 256MB AGP8X. It didn't happen before using ATI Catalyst (CCC) 6.8 & below. But whenever I have 6.9 or above installed, WB seems to glitch on me. And the little graphic errors always happen in the same areas. If I reload WB and let it reload the skin, it stops for a short time. Or if I change skins back and forth it also goes away for short time. It comes back. Especially on a reboot. BTW, I always use 1280x1024. Dual 22" SONY CRT Flat-Trinitron - extended desktop.

What you think guys ?

I've tried different WB and drivers and such. WB is on default settings, hyper-paint is off.

I've reloaded XP fresh. Once fresh with WB 5.1 and then reloaded fresh again with just WB 5.5

Still same issues. Could my video card memory be going bad? It never overheats. Gets to around 40 - 50*C in games, like BF2 and NFS Carbon. In games I see no glitches what-so-ever.

What to do ?!?!?!

What kind of glitches?

The fact that it seems to be linked to the version of your drivers rather points to them being the problem.

BTW..... where has the option to apply/not apply skin-included wallpapers gone to?

Hapkido.... if you haven't found it, go to the change wallpaper, scroll all the way to the left - click use skin wallpaper

Here is a screenshot of the graphical glitches I experience with WB.
WWW Link

The red circles point out the mistakes in WB's rendering.

And it doesn't matter which skin I use. They all do it. And in about the same places every single time, on any given window.

Like I said though if I open WB and change skins, or reload the one I'm using @ that time. It goes away. But soon as I reboot it comes back again. It is just a pain to have to load up in windows, then have to open WB up and reload the skin. Incase I wanna take a good screenshot, don't want those glitches in there  

I was hoping to contact or write to ATi Support. Just to see if perhaps it may be the drivers. And to just let them know of an issue. Just to see what they'd write back. Well since having merged with AMD, the ATi's support part of the site it down for a while now...with just a dead link to their old website.

I am running the beta under XP Pro Sp-2 on a Centrino notebook with 64MB shared video graphics memory and a gig of RAM. I am experiencing the explorer.exe issue mentioned above. The really weird thing is that the beta ran flawlessly for about three weeks - I didn't notice any issues with explorer. I was messing around, trying out Vista skins yesterday, and decided I wanted the overall skin from one and the taskbar from another. When I hit "apply" my system hung and I had to do a cold boot. This launched me into a horrific loop of rebooting and having explorer crash. Every sixth time or so, my notebook would boot normally. I've returned to Windows Classic for now and all is well.

I like the blurring of the background when changing a skin, but think it should be toned down a bit (i.e. less blurring), every so often I'll glance up at it and it seriously hurts my eyes! I wear glasses to correct short sightedness and I am very familar with viewing the world this way... Maybe I'm just being over sensitive

The explorer crash issue mentioned above is specific to Vista only.

If your PC is having such issues then one of your WB files may have become corrupted in someway when you did the hard reset.

I would uninstall WB and reinstall WB.  Possibly also deleting & reinstalling the skin that you had applied just to be sure.

Thanks Neil - I'll try that. Guess I should have read the thread more thoroughly! 

I am also having another problem with WB 5.1 & 5.5

When I look at WB's control panel, there is a part that is cut off and I can't access it.

Here are pictures of WB 5.1 under XP PRO SP2. (5.5 does this for me in Vista also)

WWW Link

Have you altered your default dialog font in the registry?  If so please set it back to the correct setting.

The only other reason I can think of is the dialog is being clipped because it is too large to fit on the screen / work area.

As a reminder, I was running the beta under WinXP Pro Sp-2 fully patched.

12/11/06 - I uninstalled WB 5 beta and rebooted. Reinstalled the beta and rebooted and can report the following:

Post first reboot after install:

Application popup: Explorer.EXE - Application Error : The instruction at "0x04d92e88" referenced memory at "0x04d92e88". The memory could not be "read

came after selecting "Outlook (2003)" from the quick launch bar.

Second reboot explorer crashed and froze - I had to manually kill it and restart it.

Subsequent reboots take a long time and always have the following information report in the applications folder of the event viewer
. This is associated with Winlogon:

The shell stopped unexpectedly and Explorer.exe was restarted.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

This error log also appears in the system folder of the event viewer, associated with Service Control Manager:


The Computer Browser service terminated with the following error:
This operation returned because the timeout period expired.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I am periodically experiencing crashes in Directory Opus 8 (unicode - with windowblinds compatibility set):

Application popup: dopus.exe - Application Error : The instruction at "0x7c918fea" referenced memory at "0x00000010". The memory could not be "written".

Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

And I am getting runtime errors in Spambayes plug-in for Outlook 2003, which has rendered it unuseable (in honestly, I am not 100% sure that this is related to WB5 Beta...).

Update: (12/11/06) Entered into another cycle of catastrophic explorer.exe crashing and restarting at system boot. This followed a BSOD that occurred while I was moving a local file onto a USB harddrive with Directory Opus 8. After two hardboots, managed to switch to Classic View from display properties and then manually killed and restarted explorer.exe. Am now going to uninstall the beta and reinstall the last release and see what happens.

Error logs related to above:

The Computer Browser service terminated with the following error:
This operation returned because the timeout period expired.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Uninstalled the beta and rebooted and my taskbar disappeared, replaced with a black space. I killed/restarted explorer.exe and everything loaded fine. The taskbar seems to be a common element as the explorer.exe crashes always seem to follow the taskbar disappearing and being replaced by a black bar. Maybe unrelated...

The runtime errors in Outloook are gone - I can run SpamBayes again, no problems reported. I'm going to leave this for a day or two to see if the problems are truly gone before loading the WB 5.1.

Well, I've been on my computer all day - over 10 hours so far (couldn't sleep!) and have rebooted a number of times. So far, with the beta off my system, I am experiencing none of the issues reported above. Tonight when I get home from work or perhaps tomorrow, I will install the latest full release of WB (5.1) and see what happens. I anticipate that the problems will not reappear, but we'll see.

Tofino: Given WB worked perfectly for 3 weeks, something clearly changed to cause this to happen.

Did you install any new software, hardware or drivers?

A BSOD or total hardlock of the PC is highly unlikely to be WB at fault.  WB can sometimes expose existing bugs in drivers etc, but this would not happen overnight.

If you have changed nothing, I would suggest you use a memory checking utility to check your RAM is all ok and check your HD for bad sectors.

What kind of stupidity is it that registered owners of windowblinds 5 cannot download this beta. This is a scam from stardock to get more people to register for their other object stuff..

This will be my last registration of this product. If paying money isn't respected and rewarded, stardock can shove it... What is the use of registering if you don't get the betas?

dmalak: Have you installed SDC and entered your serial number?

We do not produce standalone installers for betas.

Well, no but SDCentral crashes (using Vista Final here BTW)....

When I try to register my serial the windows becomes greyed out (like it isn't active) and stardock central hangs...

Well... I just had my registration details resent but SD Central doesn't accept them. Says the serial is incorrect. yeah right.

It does show my windowblinds version now but no betas. So how am I supposed to install those? I have the show pre-release(beta) versions box checked... But nothing.. Only the regular 5 version of WB.

Also on your website it explicitly says its for objectdock or whatever users only. And that is why I posted because as a paid customer I should also have access to it.

dmalak -

Ease up. You are not being "scammed" - beta builds of individual apps are only available to Object Desktop subscribers. That's been true as long as I can remember and very clearly disclosed by SD. Owners of standalone apps are eligible for free upgrades to interim release versions for up to a year (or maybe as long as in the same base version number, as I recall), though SD has traditionally been very liberal about that.

Yeah well... in the meantime I still don't have the beta.

And If I had known about that statement I would not have never registered.

And I stand by my point... If it was true as long as you can remember than it has been a scam as long as you can remember. I don't know any other company that does business like this.