UI Goes Black at Startup

I've been having this problem on and off since Christmas. One day, in December of 2006, I booted up my computer only to have the taskbar and window borders flicker black and then revert to Windows Classic. Attempting to apply another skin did not work - it would be Windows Classic, but with different colors.

The problem got so bad that I formatted my hard drive a few days after Christmas. I re-installed Windows XP (I am now running Windows XP Home Edition SP2) and the problem came back a week or two after reinstalling Windows, but I did a System Restore and the problem went away.

Now I am having the same problem again, although this time I have more memory (previously, I had 256 MB, and I have added 1 GB, and for a while I noticed an improvement in performance) and I am using different anti-virus software - in December, I was using AVG Free, and now I am using McAfee Security Center.

Today I got home, and saw that the antivirus software needed an update. I left the prompt on the screen for a few minutes, turned around and saw that it was happening again - the taskbar had black blocks on it, and it had reverted to Windows Classic. I did another System Restore (back to a point set on Monday) and it happened again.

Right now I have unloaded Windows Blinds, but I have not uninstalled it. I thought I had version 5.5 installed, but this says that I have version 5.1 installed. That is the version I had installed in December, the one that kept giving me problems. I have copied the system information and pasted it below:

WindowBlinds 5.1 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 does not support per pixel borders on WindowBlinds skins.

This is because :

Your computer graphics hardware does not support acceleration of per pixel alpha. WindowBlinds requires this for per pixel alphablended borders as without it performance would be poor. Please see if you can obtain new drivers for your graphics hardware. Recent ATI & NVIDIA boards should support this feature. Onboard graphics tend not to.

It appears you have enabled limited per pixel mode, so WindowBlinds will support per pixel, but with no hardware support.

You have one monitor in total.

(Plug and Play Monitor) 1 is attached to RADEON 7500 Family (Microsoft Corporation)

Wblind.dll 2006/10/09 12:24:20
Wblind64.dll 2006/10/09 13:51:37
Wbsrv.dll 2006/10/09 12:40:18
Wbconfig.exe 2006/10/10 18:39:13
Wbload.exe 2005/12/21 02:04:47
Wbhelp.dll 2004/09/18 17:37:07
Wbui.dll 2005/12/06 23:29:06
Tray.dll 2006/04/28 20:27:49

I was thinking of disabling limited per pixel mode, but that has not solved the problem either. I just checked to see if my graphics card drivers are updated, and they are.

windowblinds

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

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The first thing I would do is install WB 5.5

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c242

Join Date 03/2001

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RADEON 7500 Family (Microsoft Corporation)

Hmm... Wouldn't the Ati-Drivers be better in this case ? Or aren't there any current for the 7500 ?

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first of all i would search ati-amd for drivers for your graphics card, even though ur card is an older one they might still have the drivers avaliable for it. second i would get a new graphics card for the reason i mentioned before, it is an older card and they are not expensive for an entry level card at the moment, around 80 dollars will get you a good one. it could also be a dodgy ram chip. hope u work it out

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Hi, thanks for the responses. Shortly after submitting my post, I installed 5.5 and so far things have been working fine.

I am going to buy a new graphics card today, so hopefully the problem won't surface again anytime soon. I'm going to look for that article that listed graphics cards that support per-pixel borders.

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