Painting behavior in VISTA

 

In VISTA, painting behavior has been changed to improve user experience. In the new approach all top-level windows are rendered to an off-screen bitmap and then Desktop Window Manager combines the images to draw the desktop. This lead smooth graphical interface. But some application may fail to render correctly.

Some of the most common symtoms related to printing behavior

1 .Black areas around tool tips, pop-up menus, balloons, splash screens, etc.

    This can happen when the application has not painted the entire HWND, usually because that application assumed that the pixels in the background windows are good enough.

2. Flashes of black

    A related issue happens when applications do painting that's not part of a WM_PAINT. User detects the application is drawing and redrawing the desktop, but the application may not have finished drawing the HWND when that happens, and the result is the backing bitmap contains uninitialized pixels (black).

3. Glass disabled for an application

  This can happen when an application draws to the non-client area of the window (the title bar).

How to Mitigate

Option 1. (not recommanded)

  Disable desktop composition

  Apply shim “DisableDWM” [ Properties ->Compatibility Tab -> Disable desktop composition]

Option 2:

  Redesign application to not assume that it is rendering directly to the screen

So, if your application is not working properly with respect to its UI, consider trying this.