NoelC

Keith, EVEN IF you had to donate every time to get another donation key - which you don't - how much do you spend each month to send a bunch of useless text messages to your friends? Or to eat lunch at Chipotle? Fill your gas tank? Somehow I can't imagine you're hurting for 4 bucks. Or even 8 or 12. If you're buying computer hardware upgrades that often you've got no business complaining. How much did Microsoft fleece you for this OS they sold you that has less functionality than its predecessor? Do you think they'll let you freely move it to a new computer when you upgrade? Aero Glass for Win 8 / 8.1 is a good piece of software. With a suitable theme atlas, it turns the Windows 8 desktop from an eye-searing, lunch-losing experience into something you can actually live with every day. If it sold commercially it would cost 5 times the amount we're talking about here. You've wasted more than $4 of your time complaining (and more than $4 of my time complaining about your complaints). -Noel

That's a well-known issue with ribbon-enabled windows - they just don't composite the effects the same as normal GDI windows. You'll find you won't have a title glow in WordPad either. Restoring it has been described as outside the scope of what BigMuscle has developed up to now. I hear that it might be possible to restore the glow through custom theme changes. I don't use a custom theme - just a resource change via this product, so I don't have title glow on Explorer and Wordpad windows either. With Explorer the path to the location you're viewing is shown near the top of the window anyway, so after a while you get used to looking there for it. Additionally I've turned off the breadcrumbs display with Classic Shell so Explorer just shows the path plainly with backslash separators. Even though I'm working around it, I'd love it if someone would figure out how to restore the glow behind ribbon-enabled window titles. It would make the whole desktop experience more integrated. I posted this over on the Classic Shell forum... Classic Shell DOES already restore the title + glow to Internet Explorer windows. -Noel

I like the way you think. Future enhancements I can think of in 30 seconds that might have some value include: Finding a way to put a glow behind the titles of ribbon-enabled windows.A nice, clean options configurator.Enhancing the effects a bit (e.g., adding an optional "horizon glow" or maybe brightening the glass subtly near the corners).Making drop shadow directly configurable.If *I* had a slick "injection engine" and knew the things BigMuscle does, I might consider making such corollary products as: An "unsigned theme facilitator".Something that would "re-skin" (change the look of) Office 2013.I'm sure folks can think of others. -Noel

I once had something like that set up, automated by the Rules engine in Outlook. -Noel

We can only hope that folks contributing their opinions are genuinely trying to help. Just please stop to think, for a moment, that there may be unseen forces involved. -Noel

Sberdes, it's a bit beyond the scope of this thread to teach you in depth how to use the registry editor. Basically, you need to start RegEdit as administrator (aka "elevated") in order to gain the privileges to make changes. Then navigate to the Computer > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Microsoft > Windows > DWM location as given on this page: http://glass8.berlios.de/guide.html Add the DWORD value DisableGlassOnBattery and ensure it has the value: 0x00000000 (0) Restart your system and note that the glass effect is available even when you're running on battery. -Noel

1.1 is working perfectly here - nice work! The visual glitch problems I saw and could occasionally reproduce with version 1.0 are gone. I'm impressed with your care and tenacity, BigMuscle. Not everyone works that hard to track down even the rare, intermittent bugs. So often in this world today people blame users for problems on their computers rather than look for the root causes as you have done. Bravo. Thank you. -Noel

BigMuscle, you really do not even need to respond to the ingrates who complain about the most minimal inconveniences. A single notification dialog and a watermark is worth taking the time to complain? Really? The simple, direct answer to anyone who finds the startup dialog or watermark upsetting is this: If you don't like the way it works, don't use it. The whiners do not understand the level of effort you are putting into this to ensure it doesn't cause problems on their systems. They just see something valuable and drop into "I want, I want, wahhhh!" Not one of them could create what you've done themselves. In fact, you're one of the few people in the world - maybe the only one - who could have pulled it off. Trust me, your excellent work is very much appreciated by the silent majority, who may never have moved to this ridiculous Windows 8 if not for things like your Aero Glass for Win 8. Don't let a few whiners spoil it for you. You deserve many congratulations and kudos for doing this. -Noel

By the way, if you get into a situation where you're getting a continuous black screen (or black screen "loop"), just hold down the Control key. That will avert the loading of the DWMGlass.dll enhancements and get you to the desktop. -Noel

A (very) few things are always logged. But if you're still seeing all the details, have you tried restarting your system after making the change to the registry? -Noel

Amen, Brother (was commenting on a post early in the thread about how we give thanks for a beautiful desktop - the Quote balloon on this site is still not right with IE11). -Noel

Try shortening the path name. -Noel

By the way, ClassicShell 4.0.4 is released. The author adjusted the "Disable taskbar transparency" setting for Win 8.1 so as to provide a better experience with Aero Glass for Win 8.1 (the Taskbar is less colorized and more transparent). I've been testing it and it does work. -Noel

CKyHC, you won't get much in the way of rounded corners with just a theme atlas, but the theme atlas I dolled-up doesn't look too bad in daily use and gives an almost rounded corner appearance. My buttons look flatter and some don't like the dark minimize and restore buttons, but I think they step out of the way nicely and give the taskbar a nice clean look when used with a dark background. http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/themeatlas.png I also use some registry tweaks to make the chrome around Windows smaller overall. Note the SetWindowMetrics.reg file in this .zip file, which I normally supply with my Windows 8 book: http://www.ProDigitalSoftware.com/files/W8ToWork/CompanionTools.zip -Noel

Ptd163, what is your Windows version? Ideally (BigMuscle has asked above) what is the specific version info for dwmcore.dll and udwm.dll in your System32 directory? You can get that info by right-clicking on them (individually) and choosing Properties, then clicking the Details tab. Good things are coming, folks. Give BigMuscle a little time to organize everything and get another release out. -Noel

That's been true a long time with Windows. I remember as far back as Win 2000 or XP removing the shutdown entries when remoted-in. Back then one used to be able to invoke it via a menu in Task Manager. You can use the SHUTDOWN command line command (e.g., SHUTDOWN /R /T 10 to restart in 10 seconds). I get that capability back in the start menu now via ClassicShell. There's a specific configuration option in ClassicShell to enable it. -Noel

I kind of remember that BigMuscle said, at some time during the development of the product, that he was going to have the software "fall back" to a method where the injection process would try to locate the proper place to do the hooking even if it didn't find the symbols available. As I recall he also said the functionality might be somewhat more limited (this is from dim memory; I've slept since then). -Noel

Spoken as one with insufficient experience to be making such a statement. Consider, for example, that it shuts the system down with the file system dirty. People who dual-boot learn that in a hurry (not that I would advise dual booting either). I don't know about you, but I expect my system to be in a stable state when I shut it down, and I expect a startup to be fresh and clean, not carrying remnants of the last run. But use if you like. I don't mean to be negative here; I'm just trying to pass on experience. Understand that you may be taking on additional problems by trying to save those extra seconds of bootup time. That's not theory, it's practical fact. Hey, I used to use Hibernate back in the days of XP, until I learned things just worked better when I didn't. -Noel

Oomek, you might want to rethink turning on fast hybrid boot. It's trouble. -Noel

No black box problem here either. That part seems to be working fine for me using the aerohost method. For what it's worth, I'm not trying to use any 3rd party theme, just a themeatlas file. -Noel

It was explained to me that ribbon-enabled windows do their title painting via something within the theme implementation, not the same place as normal windows. Apparently it's outside the purview of this product. -Noel

VERY cool, thank you. I really didn't expect you to do a custom patch just for me. I tested it in a VM - it works. Unfortunately, a change to the content of this DLL causes a violation of system protection (SFC /verifyonly fails, for example), and it will sooner or later restore it to the version delivered by Microsoft. And I wonder... Could it cause a problem with Windows Updates (either the change might get undone, or worse, it might break the ability to update). I think to do it more permanently/compatibly you'd have to do some kind of run-time patcher along the lines of what BigMuscle has done with Aero Glass. Though I'm very impressed that you found the part of the code that eliminates the Desktop entry, I'm a bit disappointed that there was no registry setting change that would accomplish this one thing. -Noel

Since it appears the software is at least a little different than the private RC build I was running before, I'm giving it a try. I had 4 days without any visual glitches or lockups after removing the RC on the Windows 8.1 stock desktop. 4 miserable days. Will advise. -Noel

3 days no glitches, no lockups without Aero Glass for Win 8.1 (but plenty of eye strain). I'm starting to think you have a wild pointer or a buffer overflow or something that's corrupting memory, BigMuscle. I haven't run any of the older betas lately, but I know I had run for 17 days straight without a visual glitch or lockup with whatever version was current on December 8th. I think the only thing that was happening back then was that I would occasionally see a DWM restart when the monitors were off. But it never caused any problems. Do you have any piece of code that assumes a certain size/thickness for window borders? I ask because in one case the visual glitch looked like it was trying to make more of the title bar and side border thicker than it really is per my metrics settings (which make them thinner than default). -Noel

2 solid days hard use without even one single problem using this eye-straining desktop without Aero Glass for Win 8.1... No visual glitches, no lockups. An additional thing I've noticed... Not once has Explorer popped up one of its dialogs behind other windows, which it often did before. That may be a timing issue. -Noel