Interesting that the release notes for WindowFX v6.01 mention a fix for DWM crashes on Windows 7 because since upgrading from Windows 10 Pro Build 10240 to Windows 10 Pro Build 10586.3 (otherwise known as v1511) I have been experiencing a lot of DWM crashes along with display driver crashes (TDRs "The display driver had stopped responding and successfully recovered") when opening the Steam client. Is that issue really just on Windows 7 or did it actually affect Windows 8/8.1 and 10 too?
I have an NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti and have been using the v358.91 and now v359.00 drivers. These issues did not exist prior to upgrading Windows so I had no way of knowing whether it was a problem with Windows, the graphics drivers, Steam or something else. The only thing I knew for certain was that if I did NOT open Steam then I did not get any TDR errors and, in fact, I was already playing games for hours with no problems at all anyway. The issue was specific to the desktop and only Steam. I tried reinstalling Steam and my graphics drivers to no avail. Turning off hardware acceleration in Steam seemed to reduce the risk of a TDR but they still occurred randomly. Not only that but the DVM crashes were as frequent as ever and I knew I had had one by the telltale blanking of the screen.
As a last resort, I decided to disable some less used programs from booting with Windows, including the WindowFX 6.0 beta since it was a prime candidate for crashes being both a beta and an application that deals with the desktop windows and animations. Since doing that I have not any TDRs or DWM crashes. Although I updated to WindowsFX 6.01 I think I will test for a few more days with it disabled just to be sure the DWM/TDR issue is fixed.
