Neil wrote: We are aware that on some machines it takes out explorer either on initial skin apply, or on unload. We are tracking down why this is. Would the machines that have this problem be running the RTM build rather than the RC2 build of Vista?

I finally installed the latest WB beta on Vista RC2 and immediately experienced this problem applying a skin for the first time. Explorer "died" but came back to life after some waiting time. My system rates a "5.1" on the PC Rating, aka: Windows Experience Rating scale.

A short question: where is the skin sound-disable check?

Neil,

Strange..... when I checked which version I had installed via Stardock Central in Vista, it said Build 5.49a[b].020. SD then updated itself, restarted and it showed version Build 5.49a[b].021 was available. Obviously, I updated and now everything is working fine in Vista RC2 for me.

BTW..... where has the option to apply/not apply skin-included wallpapers gone to?

What kind of glitches?

The fact that it seems to be linked to the version of your drivers rather points to them being the problem.

Here is a screenshot of the graphical glitches I experience with WB.
WWW Link

The red circles point out the mistakes in WB's rendering.

And it doesn't matter which skin I use. They all do it. And in about the same places every single time, on any given window.

Like I said though if I open WB and change skins, or reload the one I'm using @ that time. It goes away. But soon as I reboot it comes back again. It is just a pain to have to load up in windows, then have to open WB up and reload the skin. Incase I wanna take a good screenshot, don't want those glitches in there  

I was hoping to contact or write to ATi Support. Just to see if perhaps it may be the drivers. And to just let them know of an issue. Just to see what they'd write back. Well since having merged with AMD, the ATi's support part of the site it down for a while now...with just a dead link to their old website.

The explorer crash issue mentioned above is specific to Vista only.

If your PC is having such issues then one of your WB files may have become corrupted in someway when you did the hard reset.

I would uninstall WB and reinstall WB.  Possibly also deleting & reinstalling the skin that you had applied just to be sure.

I am also having another problem with WB 5.1 & 5.5

When I look at WB's control panel, there is a part that is cut off and I can't access it.

Here are pictures of WB 5.1 under XP PRO SP2. (5.5 does this for me in Vista also)

WWW Link

As a reminder, I was running the beta under WinXP Pro Sp-2 fully patched.

12/11/06 - I uninstalled WB 5 beta and rebooted. Reinstalled the beta and rebooted and can report the following:

Post first reboot after install:

Application popup: Explorer.EXE - Application Error : The instruction at "0x04d92e88" referenced memory at "0x04d92e88". The memory could not be "read

came after selecting "Outlook (2003)" from the quick launch bar.

Second reboot explorer crashed and froze - I had to manually kill it and restart it.

Subsequent reboots take a long time and always have the following information report in the applications folder of the event viewer
. This is associated with Winlogon:

The shell stopped unexpectedly and Explorer.exe was restarted.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

This error log also appears in the system folder of the event viewer, associated with Service Control Manager:


The Computer Browser service terminated with the following error:
This operation returned because the timeout period expired.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I am periodically experiencing crashes in Directory Opus 8 (unicode - with windowblinds compatibility set):

Application popup: dopus.exe - Application Error : The instruction at "0x7c918fea" referenced memory at "0x00000010". The memory could not be "written".

Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

And I am getting runtime errors in Spambayes plug-in for Outlook 2003, which has rendered it unuseable (in honestly, I am not 100% sure that this is related to WB5 Beta...).

Update: (12/11/06) Entered into another cycle of catastrophic explorer.exe crashing and restarting at system boot. This followed a BSOD that occurred while I was moving a local file onto a USB harddrive with Directory Opus 8. After two hardboots, managed to switch to Classic View from display properties and then manually killed and restarted explorer.exe. Am now going to uninstall the beta and reinstall the last release and see what happens.

Error logs related to above:

The Computer Browser service terminated with the following error:
This operation returned because the timeout period expired.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Uninstalled the beta and rebooted and my taskbar disappeared, replaced with a black space. I killed/restarted explorer.exe and everything loaded fine. The taskbar seems to be a common element as the explorer.exe crashes always seem to follow the taskbar disappearing and being replaced by a black bar. Maybe unrelated...

The runtime errors in Outloook are gone - I can run SpamBayes again, no problems reported. I'm going to leave this for a day or two to see if the problems are truly gone before loading the WB 5.1.

Tofino: Given WB worked perfectly for 3 weeks, something clearly changed to cause this to happen.

Did you install any new software, hardware or drivers?

A BSOD or total hardlock of the PC is highly unlikely to be WB at fault.  WB can sometimes expose existing bugs in drivers etc, but this would not happen overnight.

If you have changed nothing, I would suggest you use a memory checking utility to check your RAM is all ok and check your HD for bad sectors.

dmalak: Have you installed SDC and entered your serial number?

We do not produce standalone installers for betas.

Well... I just had my registration details resent but SD Central doesn't accept them. Says the serial is incorrect. yeah right.

dmalak -

Ease up. You are not being "scammed" - beta builds of individual apps are only available to Object Desktop subscribers. That's been true as long as I can remember and very clearly disclosed by SD. Owners of standalone apps are eligible for free upgrades to interim release versions for up to a year (or maybe as long as in the same base version number, as I recall), though SD has traditionally been very liberal about that.