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Third Eye

Join Date 05/2001

Alpha transparency issue - overlaping titlebars and borders

I am having an issue with the alpha transparency in WB 5.01.006. I have tried the latest BETA versions and the issue remains so I switched back to the official release.

As you can see the title bars and borders are showing through. I mainly have run into this with Photoshop CS2 but after a while it also occurs with my start bar.

WB System Info:
WindowBlinds 5.0 System Information Report:

STATUS : WB+ SRV+ HLP+ UI+ TRAY+

WindowBlinds is installed correctly on this PC.

WindowBlinds appears to be activated on this PC

Your machine supports per pixel borders on WindowBlinds skins.

You have one monitor in total.

(Default Monitor) 1 is attached to NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800

Wblind.dll 2006/03/21 13:33:46
Wbsrv.dll 2006/02/05 12:58:22
Wbconfig.exe 2006/03/19 14:33:44
Wbload.exe 2006/03/13 17:54:12
Wbhelp.dll 2004/09/18 16:37:00
Wbui.dll 2005/12/06 21:29:06
Tray.dll 2005/11/02 13:28:26

System:
Windows XP Pro SP2
Intel Pentium M 2GHz
1GB RAM
NVidia GeForce Go 6800 256MB (dv: 8.4.3.0)

TIA - any help would be greatly appreciated.

windowblinds

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Does anyone else have this problem?

I am running the 5imple Alpha skin.

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Did you try yesterday's release? 5.01k(

.015
It worked well for some using NVIDIA

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I did have that same situation, the update yesterday fixed that and other issues as well.

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I wish that was the case - I loaded .016 and I am still having the same alpha transparency issue.

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Hello Third Eye,

Sorry for the delayed response, but I will make technical support aware of your problem and see if we can get you some help.

Thanks,
Jenny

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Thank you

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Third Eye and everyone else: This is actually a known issue with the Windows API. For some people it will never surface, for others it will occur very often. Any application that uses layered windows will intermittently forget its z-order setting and thereby jump ahead when it should be behind or behind when it should be ahead of another window.

This issue has been addressed in XP 2003 and 64-bit edition and I haven't come across it on Vista. Whether this will be addressed in the standard version of XP (home,pro,MCE,Tablet PC), I am unsure.

If you enable the option to "never use per pixel skins" in the Sys Info section of the WindowBlinds configuration window, this will likely not be a problem.

-Mike
[Stardock Support]

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Very odd. This only started to happen once I loaded the final release of WB 5.0. This was not happening with the Pre 5.0 BETA releases.

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I've had this problem right through the 5.?? releases. It's endlessly frustrating and makes a very nice desktop look like junk. If I exit a 3d game I get mispainted borders strewn everywhere with them not tracking the windows to which they belong.

I know it's supposedly a Windows bug... but I never expected this sort of problem from WindowBlinds.

I had similar problems with Objectdock mispainting icons under the background layer - but I think a recent release of that might have sorted it.

I'm nowhere near as optimistic WB will ever be fixed. This problem has been reported by SD staff to be more prevalent on dual display setups (like mine), but then I plugged my PC into a TV one time as the only output device and I was getting the problems there as well so frankly I don't know what to think.

Personally I'm at the point of uninstalling WB and consigning it to the scrap heap. And no the "never use per pixel skins" checkbox didn't seem to help (unless I need a restart for it to take effect).

(X800XTPE 256MB, latest ATI Catalyst drivers).

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1121

The never use per pixel skins will ALWAYS help. You would need to reapply the skin after changing that setting.

There is little we can do about this bug in Windows as it requires Microsoft to fix their bug. Microsoft do not appear to be interested in resolving problems in XP (and quite frankly they seem to care little about Vista too) Since the original 5.0 release we have modified WB to attempt to reduce the instances of the problem, but there is only so much we can do.

Updates to ObjectDock will not have changed the problem.

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