Fonts and UI elements changed even after uninstall

from Stardock Forums

I installed the WindowBlinds 11 trial and tried out a few of the styles, then decided uninstall because it was breaking things.  The problem is that some of the changes made by the styles I tried are still present. 

Specifically, the fonts in some Windows views (such as "This PC") and most third party apps except games have a different font that's a little smaller and harder to read (I tried to revert this before uninstalling, but WindowBlinds reported that the font was 11 point Segoe UI, which should be the default Windows font).

Another smaller issue is that some UI panels are the wrong color and don't change when I change my Windows color (they seem to have stayed the default color of the WB Modern style).  This is the case with the taskbar notification area overflow panel and some other panels (I forget which).

I did the following to revert back to the default Windows style:

  1. Applied the default style in WindowBlinds.
  2. Unloaded WindowBlinds.
  3. Uninstalled WindowBlinds and Skin Studio.
  4. Restarted.
  5. Ran the WB Purge tool.

At this point, most things were back to normal, but a few fonts and colors were still off so I loaded the default Windows theme (in Personalization) and set my preferred color, wallpapers, etc.  This fixed everything but the above issues.

Is this a known issue?  How can I get back to the default UI appearance?

windowblinds
41,925 views 20 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. From my experience using Windowblinds for very long time. I get back to Windows default look just by applying to default style and reboot. Not sure why it is that hard to get back to default Windows look in your case. Maybe its on specific WB theme causing the issue. Can you let us know which theme you tried out and caused the issue so we can try to reproduce it.

Thanks
Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Hi,

I tried most of the included ones and a couple of highly rated community ones.  I was using the Modern style before reverting back to the Windows default.

SoundPackager - Customize the Windows sound scheme
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Use Windows 11 personalize.  I have found there are leftover dark theme settings that I need to change to light theme to get the original windows 11 look.

There are size, theme, taskbar, and fonts settings there too.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

I'm on Windows 10, but I did take another look at personalize and noticed that "Show accent color" for taskbar was unchecked - turning that on fixed the notification area color inconsistency.  But the far bigger problem is the fonts... it's especially bothersome in third party apps, like LibreOffice, which are supposed to take their UI settings from Windows.

I tried re-installing WindowBlinds and re-applying the default style, but it didn't fix anything.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

Update - I found a buried "Restore default font settings" button that seems to have fixed the font issue:  Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Fonts\Font settings.  Everything seems to be back to normal now.

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Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Quoting synthc, reply 5

Update - I found a buried "Restore default font settings" button that seems to have fixed the font issue:  Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Fonts\Font settings.  Everything seems to be back to normal now.
End of synthc's quote

Thanks for passing that along, one of the multitude of setting I've never stumbled upon.

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting synthc, reply 5

Update - I found a buried "Restore default font settings" button that seems to have fixed the font issue:  Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Fonts\Font settings.  Everything seems to be back to normal now.
End of synthc's quote

Windows keeps a copy of its system files...I'm glad you found the restore default fonts option.

In the future, if things like that happen, or worse, there's another option described in the link (good for W7 -> W11):

https://allthings.how/how-to-fix-corrupted-files-on-windows-11/

Just thought I'd add this and 

https://nerdschalk.com/chkdsk-repair-command-how-to-use-it-on-windows-11/

The latter has cases of when to use.

There are additional ways, more "thorough" than "sfc/ scannow"...I'll leave them to folks nerdier than I.

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top

Yeah, even though it seemed like (and turned out to be) a setting that didn't get reverted when applying default style; I did try sfc and DISM to no avail.

Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting synthc, reply 8

Yeah, even though it seemed like (and turned out to be) a setting that didn't get reverted when applying default style; I did try sfc and DISM to no avail.
End of synthc's quote

Then maybe this will help:

https://woshub.com/how-to-restore-default-fonts-in-windows-8-1/

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Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top

Well, it turns out this issue actually isn't completely fixed.  Most things are back to normal, but I was finding it harder to read a lot of things and thought maybe it was just my imagination at this point - but I found a screenshot that was taken before I tried WindowBlinds which proves that things have indeed not been fully reverted.  Screenshot comparison is attached.  You can see that colors are different, and more importantly the UI text was bigger and clearer before.  I'm seeing this same difference in most apps, and confirmed it using screenshots of Unity Editor as well.

Before:

Before

After:

I've tried everything I can think of at this point, including all the steps in the guide DrJBHL posted.  This does make things significantly harder to read.  I should also say that before WindowBlinds I hadn't done any customization of Windows UI outside of setting colors in Personalize and installing Classic Start Menu (which only affects the start menu and taskbar).  LibreOffice and Unity take their UI settings from Windows and I haven't modified the UI of either.

Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top

I tested Libreoffice on my system. But I can't reproduce your issue. Here a video of it. Before applying any WB theme, Apply theme, and disable WB theme by applying Windows default theme. The start and end of the video both LibreOffice Calc Windows look the same to me. Unless I missed something.

My guess is, something else is changing your Windows system.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top

Interesting.  Are you on Windows 11?  Because my Windows 10 installation has never look like that (rounded edges on windows).

Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top

Windows 11.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting basj, reply 11

My guess is, something else is changing your Windows system.
End of basj's quote

Well I hadn't installed anything that affects Windows UI or attempted to modify the Windows UI in any way since that first screenshot was taken (nor have I updated LibreOffice since then).  I hadn't even done any Windows updates (I have it blocked by a firewall) until after I tried out WindowBlinds.  So I have no idea what else could possibly be causing this.

Maybe someone using Windows 10 could try to reproduce the issue?  I was looking for and found the skins I had downloaded/tried (for some reason they weren't cleaned up during uninstall, maybe WindowBlinds didn't uninstall properly?).  Here is the list:

Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top

Tested on Windows 10. Same result. I don't see it.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top

I finally fixed this by upgrading to Windows 11.  Now the offending UI elements look like they did before WindowBlinds.  Before installing Windows 11, I reinstalled WindowBlinds and did some more testing, and I can say with 100% certainty that there are things that WindowBlinds changes that do not get changed back when applying default theme/unloading it.

One example is the selection color (e.g. of selected text) that gets changed from the default blue to green and does not revert.  Hopefully you guys will look into the list of skins I posted above, because this kind of thing is unacceptable (having to upgrade/repair install to get back to default).

Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top

Strangely it is not the case on my Windows 10 system when revert back to default Windows 10 theme. The selected text turn back to blue from green after restarting explorer.exe and leaving the system for sometime. Not sure what happened within that time though.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top

Did you try the fixes in response #15?

Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting basj, reply 18

Strangely it is not the case on my Windows 10 system when revert back to default Windows 10 theme. The selected text turn back to blue from green after restarting explorer.exe and leaving the system for sometime. Not sure what happened within that time though
End of basj's quote

Actually, I was so focused on fonts and icons that I didn't even notice this, but my highlight color is STILL green, even after upgrading Windows.  I had found a way previously to change it back via a registry edit... I guess I'll do that again if it's still bothering me.

Quoting DrJBHL, reply 19

Did you try the fixes in response #15?

End of DrJBHL's quote

No.  The text was not blurry; it was smaller, spacing was weird, and it just looked off.  There were also some icons and colors in apps that were still changed and hard to see.