UCyborg

I've seen this more than half-year ago while I still had 10 as my main OS (Anniversary Update), though not as frequent. Interestingly, @NoelC said he's running 1.4.5 on his 8.1 machine because 1.4.6 caused glitches. On my old Radeon on the other hand, anything below 1.4.6 (I tried 1.4.5, 1.4.1 and 1.3.1) causes massive screen artifacts, windows leaving residual artifacts, parts of screen getting corrupted etc. Again, they can be avoided by turning off blur. The two obvious glitches that still show up from time to time can be seen in the alt-tab switcher (I use the one from Windows Vista which gives glassy appearance) and around the start button. Not always the option, updates can cause other issues, though the results indeed differ between different drivers. I tried Aero Glass on another laptop still running CU with Intel HD 4000 with whatever drivers were newest in late 2015 and it works OK there.

Just make Explorer use the old, more functional and less buggy view control. There are several options to activate it, one way is Folder Options X; install it and make sure Enable icon reordering is ticked. QTTabBar users can activate it in its options under Compatible Folder View:

I've been messing with this exact theme in the past, so it's already done. Just overwrite original aero 2.msstyles file in your Aero 7 folder. Also, it might be a good idea if you copy the content of \Themes\aero\Shell folder into \Themes\Aero 7\Shell. Someone reported glitches in Explorer because of older shellstyle.dll. The author doesn't find the time to rebuild the whole thing for newer Windows 10 builds. https://drive.google.com/open?id=15jXoY5SNxwcm7a7DFJsceDe0iCIRgpNn

Start regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM, create new DWORD with a name CenterCaption and set its value to 1. This won't cover applications that render caption text on their own, most notably ribbon-enabled stuff like Explorer, Paint, WordPad etc. You need to use modified theme to cover those, so you'll have to use one of the methods that allow usage of unsigned themes. Afterwards, you can try to load the attached theme. It's a stock theme with nothing else changed except caption text alignment for such windows. Extract the content to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes CenteredCaptions-Win10-Build-16299.zip

Nothing, Winaero Tweaker is just an interface for altering some Windows registry settings. There's no way to tell by what means a particular setting was altered so implementing something like that would just add unnecessary complexity and probably increase number of complaints. Anyway, just click Disable Action Center in Winaero Tweaker on the left and clear the checkbox on the right then log off and back on for changes to take effect.

Finally caught some glitches related to blurring feature (BlurDeviation) on the screenshots! They're shown on the program Windows Style Builder. I was getting the exact same glitches with the older debug version of Aero Glass when running Windows 10 natively with the newer NVIDIA card, but didn't suspect Aero Glass as the culprit at the time. The problem I'm seeing with the blurring enabled is that it simply causes parts of the screen to not refresh immediately. Apparently we're getting them in different places with different hardware configurations. First, Image tab from the element that was selected before is displayed rather than Minimal DPI tab: Hovering over the tab with mouse causes it to refresh and display correctly: Revealing the second tab: And the rest of them (also note the differing states of the buttons on the ribbon under Image, none should be greyed out, I only noticed that after I got all the screenshots): This one was captured after desktop background change, I clicked on the Small Icons Start Button element when the image was changing: And another screenshot with missing elements on the right pane under Enum: Disable blurring and the glitches disappear.

I know, I could've sworn I've read somewhere they were going to change that at one point to make upgrades smoother/faster. Oh well.

Didn't they say something about feature updates not reinstalling the whole OS again? Or is that for the future feature updates? Once again, it took forever to upgrade to on my low-end laptop (4+ hours). Somehow it survived all updates and upgrades so far. OS was first installed on November 2015 and still works.

I figured QTTabBar can activate the old view control as well. With Folder Options X, ticking Enable icon reordering activates it. The old one lets you choose whether you want full row selected or not, but it's not mandatory. QTTabBar allows to tweak it even further. Using the old control (the option for it is named Compatible list view style in QTTabBar) gets rid of the extra whitespace in This PC on the left before the icons and even the scrollbar jumping up bug triggered by accent color change. Edit: this crash is also avoided.

Running in virtual machine masks the glitches even on systems where they occur natively. Interestingly, blurring works for me without glitches on Windows 8.1 with the same card/driver combo (using AG 1.4.6). How do you do that?

I have. Not getting exactly this one, but I mentioned similar glitches in the other thread. I can confirm they disappear when turning off blur.

I don't know any further, those are official MS instructions. There might be something different on your end. Maybe someone else can help.

You can install .NET Framework 3.5 from Windows 8 install media using DISM. Open Command Prompt as admin and run: Dism /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFX3 /All /Source:D:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess Replace D: with wherever you have DVD/installation ISO mounted. The DX June 2010 runtimes I linked work on all systems from XP to 10 AFAIK. Just one small thing is still missing on Vista and newer, Direct3D Retained Mode runtime, you can either download it from dgVoodoo 2 download page or take d3drm.dll from Windows XP install, it's in \Windows\System32 on 32-bit system and place it in \Windows\SysWOW64 on your 64-bit Windows 8.1 installation.

I'd just like to reset everything related to colors to how it is by default and failing miserably. Thought I solved it, but the problem just migrated over to the secondary monitor. Except that now I get completely black screen with only mouse cursor visible. DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010) This installs some DX9 extensions and stuff like XInput and older XAudio components. The rest of DirectX is part of the OS. As for .NET, did you enable .NET Framework 3.5 from Control Panel->Programs and Features->Turn Windows features on or off? Edit: Right, .NET Framework 3.5 install might require internet connection for the first time...

Yes, disabling part of Aero Glass that deals with UWP app frames:

The issue with caption text not being re-centered when window is resized the certain way is still present (2nd paragraph):

I managed to fix colors by messing around in Color Management GUI some more and after getting it to load the default ICC profile, the colors now stick even after removing it from the list for the selected monitor, which is the default state, without ATI Tray Tools' interference. Now what's really interesting, those settings which must be copied from the profile somewhere else can under certain unknown circumstances get messed up in a way that you end up with a black screen with only mouse cursor visible. Can't deny the overall list of addressed issues with updates is impressive. But I guess this is it as mainstream support will end soon.

Did you find the solution to the problem? Did messing with DALNonStandardModesBCD entries help? I guess you could compare the full list in registry after each driver is installed and maybe use the list from the older driver if it's really connected to that for some reason. But it seems strange that the default resolution list would make the whole thing crash on one OS but not the other. Would be good to know if monitor's native resolution ends up on it. DALNonStandardModesBCD# entries can be edited with Registry Editor after the driver is installed, one could boot the OS with just the basic driver, then search for DALNonStandardModes, they should be in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000. The 0000 might differ on systems with multiple graphics cards installed or if just the driver is installed but the card is not present. The format is quite simple, it's a sequence of resolutions and refresh rates, spread through multiple entries, I have 4. I've also noticed with various drivers for older cards that the default entries can differ. They can be used to add custom resolutions, I use it to add 1440x1080 resolution to the list by adding: 14 40 10 80 00 00 00 60 It's not encoded and can be read like you read any plain number on the paper. In Registry Editor, each mode ends up in its own line, so it's easier to read from there. So the first four bytes are width x height, followed by 3 zero bytes and finally the refresh rate. Not sure about the higher numbers, I guess you use last two bytes for higher refresh rates. My hardware is not that fancy so I can't try to see. Interestingly, some resolutions in my list have refresh rate set to zero. Under normal circumstances, changes can be tested just by disabling and re-enabling graphics card in Device Manager.

What about KUC Update Checker? It automates whole updating process and can remove some obsolete updates. It ended up installing about 100 updates on my PC, even though Windows Update thought I was updated before I ran it. There's a guide in the FAQ on how to use it, some options are named a bit differently in current versions, on the page with the section containing 4 checkboxes together and some of them are mentioning LDR/GDR stuff, all can be checked. Judging by their descriptions, I assume it's the correct choice. One might end up with a bunch of permanent superseded updates that cannot be removed, I suppose these can be safely ignored. It may also have to be run a number of times, until it shows there are no more updates to add. Unfortunately, despite the tons of updates, Windows 8.1 still has a number of unresolved bugs, these are the things I've observed on my own: Event log (Applications and Services->Microsoft->Windows->Diagnostics-Performance->Operational) is being spammed with events with IDs 500 and 501 at one hour interval; DWM is complaining about CPU resources being over-utilized and degraded responsiveness, even though in reality, everything functions normally. Group policy setting "Turn off Application Compatibility Engine" is ignored. This issue appeared in Windows 8.1 and is inherited by Windows 10 as well. Disabling maximized windowed mode for the old fullscreen DIrectDraw/Direct3D up to version 7 based applications/games will not work correctly when having multiple monitors enabled in extended mode. A number of DDraw/D3D calls will fail and monitors will blink like crazy like on this video. This issue is exclusive to Windows 8.1. Another DDraw bug. when switching to and away from the particular application/game that runs at the same display mode (resolution, refresh rate) as the desktop, it waits and timeouts on DWM_DX_FULLSCREEN_TRANSITION_EVEN event object. The timeout is 3 seconds, the event is only signaled when the desktop resolution/refresh rate doesn't match the application's. So unless some monitor needs more than 3 seconds to change display mode, running in different display mode makes that scenario faster. This one is present in WIndows 8 and above. I'm also having some problems with Color Management, turns out the color profile that comes with my monitor makes everything darker. Apparently, it wasn't used while I still had NVIDIA card in my PC (probably their software being in charge of color management), which started causing problems recently so I had to replace it with older ATI card I still have laying around. I've removed the profile under Color Management globally, made sure it doesn't appear neither if I tick Use my settings for this device and guess what happened today, when I started Windows everything was red. What the hell??? I ended up configuring ATI Tray Tools to reset colors on every startup, hopefully that'll work. When I removed that profile on my test Win10 installation, the colors were reset immediately. I don't know how Windows 7 handles this one. Windows 8.1 is really weird, Windows 7 is easier to manage from my experience. And even this one has its quirks, eg. if I remember correctly it introduced the bug with flickering when rendering things with GDI, see this and the video. The link to the test application no longer works, but the visual problem it causes can be observed in the old Pinball that came with Windows XP when the ball looks as if it disappeared at high speeds. The workaround is to apply NoGDIHWAcceleration shim to affected application with Compatibility Administrator, it's part of Windows ADK on Windows 8+. Seems like one of those things that should work correctly out of the box as it's not caused by using GDI wrong AFAIK. There are some other things, but I'll stop here.

Nothing like Aero Glass I'm afraid. WindowBlinds can be configured to provide glass effect, though it comes with extra bells and whistles; its own skinning engine. It's also somewhat heavier and at one point, it was said somewhere that its way of doing things is not the most optimal, don't know if this still applies. Even the current experimental build of AG seems to be the hit or miss whether it works properly or not.

I'm observing some visual artifacts after swapping my GeForce GTX 750 Ti for the older Radeon HD 4890 as the former has started to cause the system to completely freeze on regular occasions. When the notification box leaves the screen, part of it stays on the screen for a second before it disappears. Also noticed when scrolling down through keys in Registry Editor, lower portion of the pane with keys isn't refreshed immediately, eg. I have to move mouse wheel about 3 times before I'd see the correct names of the last 3 keys. The glitches do not show up on screenshots and do not occur when Aero Glass is not running. They do not show up neither if Aero Glass is run with basic display driver.

There's only experimental build for 64-bit Windows 10 version 1709 in the Experimental versions section requiring manual installation. 32-bit variant of Aero Glass is no longer developed.

Does the program offer option to change its skin? From the screenshot on its website, it looks like it's using custom window border, so Aero Glass cannot influence it. Some programs have the option to revert back to Windows default frame.

Probably, you can check and see if you have ACPI related items in Device Manager under System Devices. At least when installing Windows 98 into VirtualBox, manual intervention is required to enable ACPI support on the OS level.

More bugs! Read the warning on Visual Assist download page.