Same problem with start button hanging; I have uninstalled WB5 & am sticking with 4. I have a NVidia GeForce FX Go 5200 32MB video card on my toshiba portege m200 tablet, 768 mb ram, xp sp2, 1.5 ghz centrino.

Well I get a pretty consitent 2% of CPU usage with WindowsBlinds, is this normal? Happens with any skin and i notice its csrsse.exe which is the one taking the time. I was on the understanding that it would not use resources from CPU? Happens even with the default skin and this is a clean install.

This doubles naturally with Cool and Quiet enabled, since cpu speed is cut in half.

The problem is on startup for me, when SDMCP loads, until I end the process it makes my start button/sys tray hang (the cursor over them is an hourglass). When I end it, the problem goes away.

However, WB 5 doesn't work at all on my system--the desktop wallpaper appears, but all my toolbars/taskbar reverts to Win Classic as someone else has mentioned.

none of the navigational bars work on mine and it is a legit copy but i deleted my email because of certain reasons and i dont have an email right now

go back and read comment #21 Link

So, any idea what the problem is here? I'm pretty disappointed, having paid $80 for the OD ensemble and not being able to use one of the main attractions (WB).

Usually that means explorer is too busy processing something else

>Similar to a posting above, If I ctrl-alt-del and end the SDMCP
>process I get my taskbar back immediately. What is SDMCP needed >for?

SDMCP is the Stardock process that drives WindowBlinds and who knows what all else - once you kill it, the system goes back to the pre-Stardock state, so, the taskbar will work as it should, since the Stardock "filter" is now off.

Neil, I offer my apologies as I appear to have fixed my issue although it's such a weird one!

I have hotkeys assigned to most programs/shortcuts on my system for quick launching anything I need - recently a very annoying problem began where there would be a 1/2 second delay from pressing any hotkey to seeing the eggtimer and my program being launched. By pure chance last night I'd been running Tune-Up utilities and one thing it hightlighted to me was my no-ip.com client which runs in the background was using 27mb or RAM!

Further investigation reveals that my OutPost firewall rules were blocking this program from getting out to the no-ip.com servers but also a bug was causing their program to increase memory usage and looks like was causing my hotkey slowdown!

I updated the no-ip.com client to the very latest, sorted the firewall rule and my hotkey speed is back to being instantaneous!!!

The other good news is that the taskbar now does not freeze for 2 minutes upon starting my machine with WB5

So I'm hoping it was all just related to that and hopefully all is running fine again (fingers crossed).

SDMCP was obviously causing some issues with the above problem because EVERYtime I ended that process I got my taskbar working again immediately.

Neil, if SDMCP has nothing to do with WB5 running then is there a simple way to stop it even being loaded upon startup please - I see no point in having any extra baggage running on my lean machine...

Also, maybe others with this frozen taskbar issue have some OTHER Windows processes that are having issues upon startup like my no-ip.com client had, causing extra cpu cycles or something....

Fedorov.