NoelC

Hard to imagine "much better" when Aero Glass on Win 8.1 works fine and lasts a long time, but I too would be interested in hearing about others who've solved the problem of bringing back style to Win 8.1 desktops... -Noel

Yes indeed, ~28 processes. Well done. Functional and with minimal fluffery. Remember XP? You could get it in the high teens. I don't even remember how many I had tweaked NT 4 down to or the versions before that. God I've been tweaking Windows a long time. First version I remember fooling with was on a PC XT. -Noel

I only have Workstation 11, with an overlaid VMware Tools package from a newer version. I'm waiting until whatever they release this Fall to see whether I want to upgrade. I'm guessing it'll be version 14? -Noel

Indeed. It is the Emperor Darth Sidious of operating systems (even Darth Vader had good in him). I have gone to extremes to try to "feel the good" in Windows 10. I've applied all the tweaks I can find (Classic Shell is just the start of the list) and have invented a few myself. I don't speak in hypothetical terms, I don't go with what others say, I have taken it upon myself to find out personally... Yep, evil. Because Microsoft has turned on us. All I've been able to achieve - ALL I'VE DONE - is made it less apt to do the things I don't want it doing, and to look more (but not fully) like I want it to look. Explorer comes up blank sometimes or Aero Glass crashes WinLogon.exe or it starts several extra "hosts" or it just runs less efficiently than any Windows ever - and that's with extreme tweaking. Microsoft actively breaks some part of all that every month or so. Here it sits - in a Virtual Machine ONLY, because I wouldn't put it on my hardware - if for no other reason than Microsoft ENSURES it will remain unstable. For me Win 8.1 is still holding up, stable and a real workhorse running on my hardware for days, weeks, months. -Noel

I'm not sure anyone ever promised it would all work without at least restarting DWM - or logging off/on - or rebooting. -Noel

Note that Microsoft have recently screwed up (and subsequently fixed) multi-monitor support (in Win 7), so working with rectangles and signed X,Y values is apparently still something that's difficult for even those coding the OS itself. https://www.askwoody.com/2017/microsoft-patches-buggy-windows-7-patch-kb-4039884-solves-the-dual-monitor-rendering-problem/ Any chance the bug at the root of this problem is latent in all systems and could be affecting later Windows versions running Aero Glass for Win 8+? A longshot, I know. Note that one of the workarounds is to ENABLE desktop composition, so maybe not. Still... -Noel

Doctorwizz, don't I recall reading that you are running multiple graphics cards from different vendors (AMD and nVidia)? If I've remembered that correctly, that's an iffy setup, and the Aero Glass package could just be asking it to do something uncommon, which the drivers are unable to work out together. AMD and nVidia have never played well together. That being said, I don't have the ability to extend my Win 10 VM across multiple monitors any more, so I can't verify multi-monitor operation of the latest builds. I wish I did, but I think I'll need an updated version of VMware to accomplish that again. Hopefully they'll release their 2017 version soon (usually they release in the fall). -Noel

>randomly folders that appear to be empty when they are not You sure that's not just Windows 10 Creator's Edition doing that? I saw it both without and with Aero Glass for Win 8+. -Noel

The only App I can check is Settings. That one seems to work okay... The ApplicationFrame.pdb folder contains a file dated June 15, 2017. -Noel

Version 1.5.5 installed and runs fine, once I get logged-in. No interest in Apps here, though it would be cool if it were possible to color and back the titles on ribbon-enabled windows like we once could. Note the Bowpad editor window at the center-right doesn't have the right title coloring. -Noel

Thanks. For a long while I saw no failures, but since I put in the released version of Aero Glass is out it's been happening. I suspect the change in timing, as you have mentioned. Right now winlogon.exe is crashing almost every time I boot up the system, even when I don't set it up to auto-logon. The sequence goes like this: Blue 4 pane Windows logo. Logon screen background showing "Preparing Windows" Brief black screen. Logon prompt. Right now I just booted it up and saw no failures. When that happens, item 3 above is missing. When I find a little time I'll definitely experiment with your idea of using UxTSBLoader to see how that changes the behavior. -Noel

Weird. When I first got v1703 as an in-place upgrade life continued as usual. I was able to re-tweak it, removing all Apps, and still was able to update it. Life was good until somewhere around 15063.2xx. Then it just stopped accepting updates without any usable error message, so I reinstalled v1703 from scratch. After the reinstallation I tried every combination of removing apps, not removing apps, disabling services, etc. I finally landed on a combination where I didn't lose the ability to successfully install Windows Updates, which involved NOT removing the Apps. Funny thing... I just tried disabling all the Apps again with my script using a snapshot of 15063.502 and lo and behold it updated just fine to 15063.540. I guess it was just some update early on that required the Apps to remain in place, where the current cumulative updates don't. Perhaps I'll investigate the viability of App-free and Cortana-free operation again. -Noel

Hm, are you using UAC? (chances are you are; I'm one of the few who still disables it) There is a tweak listed in the WinAero Tweaker application that promises to "Enable access to mapped Network Drives from elevated apps. By default it is turned off, so any elevated app can't access your mapped network drive." Seems like it might be the solution to your issue. -Noel

I am not seeing crashes while using the new Release build. I did see some failures when I set my Win 10 v1703 system to auto-logon via netplwiz, though I'm not sure that has anything to do with Aero Glass. I've disabled that for now. I just installed the Chrome browser to test... I don't seem to be able to crash it by dragging a tab off a window to make a new window. Nor can I reproduce a crash by moving small windows. This is the full set of files I'm running: -Noel

I can only imagine some folks are talking about released Windows versions while others are talking about pre-release Windows. Aero Glass only supports released versions of Windows. People of course TRY it with the insider versions, with varying consequences. -Noel

Or you could just keep notes, if only you had a computer on which to store a file... ;-) -Noel

Thank you kindly for the build, Big Muscle! I just sent you 10 Euro. Aero Glass for Win8.1+ 1.5.4.935 x64 correctly loaded (C:\AeroGlass\DWMGlass.dll). -Noel

To those who have put in effort to make this site what it is: Thanks very much! It's been fun. -Noel

Hi Big Muscle, I'm not sure whether you read this site any more, and I imagine you have found it tedious to try to keep Aero Glass for Win 8+ working with all the new Windows versions, but given that v1703 is now mainstream, might you consider building your current Beta code in Release mode? Build 904 is not perfect - I still see occasional DWM crashes in my VM with IE if I browse to e.g., yahoo.com - but it's not too bad otherwise. Thanks for considering this request. -Noel

On a related note I've found - disappointingly - that it's all too common a practice to set compiler warning levels low. That probably implies it's like that in proprietary software development as well. "What you don't know can't hurt you", right? Wrong. I'm SURE there would have been some message emitted about that pointer truncation error if only the programmer hadn't made a sweeping "I don't care about warnings" gesture. Why wouldn't everyone want the warning level turned all the way up? The compiler is already capable of telling people they're stuffing a 64 bit loaf of bread in a 32 bit bread box. Sorry for the small rant. I just contributed some work - most of which was accepted, happily - to an open-source project to tidy up hundreds of warnings about mixing up signed and unsigned values. I've mandated /Wall here at my company (which is one level more picky than /W4 in Visual Studio). There a very few overly pedantic ones (like emitting a message for every function that's been successfully inlined) that we suppress, but for the most part, if liberties have been taken with the code, the programmer will know about it right away. -Noel

Well, to be fair an OS IS supposed to be defensive against application software causing problems. It's nice to hear that there are engineers within Microsoft who actually still care about robustness. -Noel

The last theme atlas I published for Win 10 still works just fine for the Creator's Update as far as I know. Here's the RoundedCorners atlas I am currently using with the Aero 7 theme by Sagorpirbd... To be honest I've forgotten whether it can work with other themes. The .layout file is supposed to make these theme atlases portable. http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/15063/RoundedCorners_For_Aero7.zip -Noel

Right, hence my mention of validation. That's an extra implied dimension thrown in just to make things more complex. And as if the problem doesn't have enough dimensions already, their capabilities and qualifications are changing over time. We poor humans just want to oversimplify things, and things are most certainly not simple when it comes to integrating technology into our lives. I feel sorry for the poor folks who just give up and put their lives in the hands of those who claim to be qualified, but in reality have butterfingers. -Noel

I see no problem with my analogy. Microsoft is MOST CERTAINLY not qualified to drive my computers, nor to go through my data. That they engineered some components of my systems / network makes them qualified to supply components, and only after serious validation. I think this touches on the crux of the problem. They are trying to take the stance that they're qualified to run systems only after having shown themselves to be (barely) qualified to supply parts. -Noel

Like I said, a good learning experience, not dissimilar from keeping the car keys out of the little ones' hands - though I'm not sure I'd hand over the keys first in order to find out what could happen. "With great computing power comes great responsibility." But if I understand you correctly, the computer IS server-connected, right? Just to Microsoft's servers. The servers that manage your "Microsoft Account". Microsoft's point with "Windows as a Service" goes along the lines of "user's can't be expected to manage their own systems or data, so hand it over to us and we'll take care of it". I'm not sure I agree with that. Sure, not everyone wants to be a computer geek, but does the pendulum have to swing ALL THE WAY the other way? Maybe instead of "taking over", Microsoft should be building robust systems that keep the control in users' hands but help them in new and unprecedented ways to keep their data safe. Windows 7 gave us the ability to back our systems up, and even reminded us to set up a backup process that was useful to us. SOME people actually listened and did it, because they realized their data has value to them. More recently, it's as if Microsoft wants people to feel as though their data has no value, and that they should be "living in the moment" only. Perhaps I'm weird, but I consider handing over my administrative account information (and telemetric data, data files, etc.) to Microsoft in the same light as handing car keys to kids. Why does anyone think that's a good idea? -Noel