Sorry this will be a long post. TLDR, set DS to use "Pause When A Window Is Maximized" in the Advanced tab of the settings when using it in conjunction with programs not in full screen mode, particularly music production software.

Hi, I just wanted to post an experience I have been having with DeskScapes 11 causing a crash when running in the background and using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, for music production) and certain plugins/VST's.

I hope by making Stardock and people in general aware of this issue and the fix, this might save a lot of headaches as it isn't immediately obvious what the problem is (at least for me).

I make music on my PC but I also use it for gaming, general browsing, YouTube and so on and use DeskScapes as my main desktop background program as I really like the animated backgrounds.

A while ago, I started to experience problems with crashes when using Cubase 12 (a DAW) and certain plugins (VST's) and in particular with iZotope's Ozone 10 software. It's not really important what any of that software is or does, but when using OZ10, it would start to glitch a bit and then just crash and crash Cubase 12 (the host program) to the desktop. I am on Windows 10 22H2 btw.

I tried to use OZ10 in some other DAW's (Reaper and Mixcraft 10) and the same thing happened there. I couldn't figure out what was causing the problem so I got in touch with iZotope and began an email support exchange to get to the bottom of the issue.

At first I thought it was a graphics driver problem as every time the crash occurred and I checked Windows Event Viewer logs, it would point towards an OpenGL issue and not being able to find the driver. I had the latest Nvidia studio driver which includes OpenGL so I wasn't sure what was happening.

Anyway, to cut to the chase. In my last conversation with iZotope, they suggested I go into Task Manager and disable any programs that may use my display settings as some (such as capture software) have been known to cause problems. I know I probably should have tried this approach first but I didn't think of it.

So I disabled anything that used graphics such as Philips Hue Sync App and some others but I wasn't able to shut down DeskScapes as it would just start back up again in Task Manager and the system tray icon and program itself has no option to exit it. I ran Cubase and OZ10 and the crash happened again.

I looked online and found an old Stardock forum post where someone was asking how to disable DeskScapes and the reply was that it automatically pauses when you load another background image, so I loaded a stock Windows background, this paused DS and then ran the Cubase test again and this time both it and OZ10 worked without a crash, so I was sure it was DS that was causing the problem.

Just to be sure I ran the test a few more times, either with DS paused and a stock background or with DS running as normal. Whenever DS was running, then the crash occurred, whenever it was paused then the the programs didn't crash.

I then looked into DeskScapes options and saw in the Advanced tab that you can set it to pause either when a window is in full screen mode (the default for me) or when it is maximized. Cubase and most DAW's run in maximized window mode so I changed the option to reflect that and ran the tests again and this fixed the issue, no more crashes.

For some reason, if DS is set to only pause when a window is in full screen, this causes a conflict with either Cubase or Ozone 10 (or maybe both) and makes them crash but set to maximized mode, then DS is paused in the background as Cubase is the primary maximized window open and no crashes occur.

This was something I didn't know was an issue and something people may need to be aware of. I think it would be good if DeskScapes has an option to just exit it altogether, like nearly every other program on your desktop, rather than just pause it. I'm sure there may be other times when people might not want to have it running in the background or at all temporarily and then start it up again after. Or perhaps there could be some kind of auto-window-mode detection so it knows when a window is the primary thing you're looking at (whether it is maximized or full screen) and just pause DS anyway so it's not just running in the background.

Hope this may be of help.