do you have your desktop icons hidden?

do you have web items locked?

do you have anything else that manages wallpaper that might be causing conflict?

No. I am not using any of those. Is my situation the exception? Does this wallpaper randomization work correctly for other people? Even though I'm rebooting my system it should be showing truly random wallpapers?

Sorry for not being overly clear. What I meant is that the answer was 'no' to everything you had asked. I understand that random means exactly that but I was just curious as to whether I was seeing something that other people don't. I mean, I do have lots and lots of wallpapers selected to be part of the rotation in Windowblinds yet I keep seeing the same few over and over. That just seems a little odd. Even if I only had 100 wallpapers I should think that I would see a little more variety than the ones that I'm seeing. And I still can't understand why it sometimes picks a blank desktop background. Regardless, I do like Windowblinds a lot. I just wish I could understand what it's doing!

Where do I tell where it's pulling wallpapers from? I currently have 166 images in c:\windows\web\wallpaper and all of these are selected to be included in the Windowblinds randomization. Yet I still keep seeing the same few over and over. I'm starting to think that this program has a bug in it. Where do I report an official tech support issue?

by clicking the hammer/wrench

you will also see them by clicking the 'thmbnail' option to the left of that

you'll also see them scrolling through the thumbnails in the randomize section - double click anything you don't want

depends on the random

techically, even with true random - you could get just the same one over and oever

mine's been changing every hour - haven't seen any blank colors yet - made sure none were selected - but I haven't paid attention to which one's show up when

hope you're not counting the weekend, they're off then

did you get the auto reply?

did you check your spam?

I have completed my data gathering of the first 50 random hourly wallpaper changes on my system. The results follow.

WindowBlinds currently has 180 images set up for use as wallpaper on my system. Logically, that means that each time Windowblinds goes to pick a random wallpaper, each image has a 1 in 180, or 0.6% chance of being selected. That would be the case if the application code was correctly written.

In my test of 50 hourly changes, WindowBlinds used only 24 different wallpapers. The most commonly used one was used a total of 6 times,a highly unusual number of occurrence when there is only a 0.6% chance of that one being selected.  A number of others were used 4, 3, or 2 times. In many cases the same wallpaper would follow after the previous one, even thought WindowBlinds is not set to use them in sequence, nor do the images appear in sequence in WindowBlinds or in their respective system folders. In fact, sometimes they aren't even in the same directory.

My conclusion is that the code that this product feature is using is not working correctly, as I originally suspected. I also have received no response from Stardock, automatic or otherwise, regarding my email sent to support@stardock.com. It has been 7 days since I sent it. I would appreciate it if they would at least man up and admit that this doesn't work. Do they read these forums?

I'm thinking I might next test the Random Skin feature as it seems that I'm also, no surprise, seeing the same skins repeated over and over.

I hope that they don't use the same randomization code in any of their games.

I just used the email address in the earlier post in this thread. Is it better to submit it as a support ticket? I know it didn't hit my system as spam because I review all flagged messages.

Yeah, same email. I'll try filling out a ticket. But since you're the only one that's participated in this thread, what's your take? Do my results, including the situations with the same sequence of files, sound like those of a typical randomization. With almost 200 different options to choose from, I should've seen much more variation. And the same files being chosen in sequence must be the hell out of some odds somewhere. I have no intention of putting in the time, though, to figure out how unlikely my results should be!

i've read all your replies bichur. thanks so much for all the information. it helped me.