it's no wonder MS is going down

[nikos]

microsoft are wondering why it has all turned pear shaped for them. Once world dominance, now one flop OS after the other. I will tell you one reason why, because once upon a time there used to be proper support, and now this is what they call support

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forum ... f=required

They are constantly adding features, without documentation and without support. All developers are alienated. Then they are wondering why nobody wants to write software for windows 8 anymore!?

[Kilmatead]

Yes, but he did continually say "Thanks for helping make community forums a great place" anyway. What he left out was that "as your example was not written in our proprietary C# sludge, you're really not our kind of developer and we have very little interest in helping you." If you're not enterprise, you're not on the MS bandwagon.

He's apparently the kind of helper-dweeb that Arnold Schwarzenegger used to just punch and sparks would fly out and the crowd would cheer.



I miss the Saturday Matinée film experience. Now it's all "zombie this, vampire that". Whatever happened to the age of schlocky heroes? <Sigh>

[lank]

I wonder if your problem is along the same lines I've seen on my Windows 7 computer. Only mine is much worse.

The sub-menu icons on some of my programs (not developed by me) are basically black until I hover my mouse over them and then they turn to whatever color they are supposed to be. Seems something on this particular computer broke because my Windows 7 notebook with basically the same programs and configuration is OK. Only happens with menus that have icons other than check marks or are blank and mostly context menus.

I took a stab at contacting Microsoft on the phone but that was a wasted effort. "Not a bug so it must be user configuration error so we can't help you. Thanks for your money."

[Kilmatead]

The sub-menu icons on some of my programs (not developed by me) are basically black until I hover my mouse over them...

Sounds more like this sort of thing (a surprisingly popular problem). If not that, then you installed something didn't uninstall properly once upon a time, and you get to live with its residue.

[lank]

Thanks. I already tried all that with no success. Yea, I'll probably have to live with it either until I install Windows 10 (maybe) or actually find what got messed up and can fix it. Although I'm not holding my breath for either.

I even thought of doing a clean install from a restore partition but can't talk myself into it because of all the programs I'd have to re-install.

[Kilmatead]

If you'll forgive me one more shot in the dark, while messing around creating menus with icons for the different utilities I do, I've found that different themes can wildly vary the rendering of those icons - depending on highlighting, alpha-channel translucency, etc.

The most significant distortions and painting-flaws (around icons) show up when enabling/disabling desktop-compositioning. At its simplest, this is what is partially responsible for the "aero" theme (even if you don't use it), and has a large impact on how things are repainted - such as when you move the mouse over GUI elements, Windows is constantly "invalidating" the foreground/background elements to force re-drawing depending on what kind of highlight may need to be applied or refreshed. For example, when you open a menu or right-click for a context menu (in or out of applications), you're actually creating multiple small windows (they are roughly the same as "normal" windows, except they don't have visible borders per se) upon which the menu-items, their icons, and selection rectangles are drawn and manipulated. Each "menu" and "submenu" that you browse through are all essentially separate child-windows of the parent (or the desktop itself).

Still with me? Obviously you don't actually need to know all that, but it goes a long way to understand how many different things can go wrong at any stage - especially the invalidation/repaint stage. (The mechanism that tells Windows what to repaint is actually called "regional invalidation" throughout the Win32 API, just in case you think I'm making this stuff up. )

Thus, I have two simple suggestions - first, try switching to alternate themes even just for a few seconds... making sure that you try Aero at least once, and "Windows Classic" at least once. You can switch to others as well, such as "Windows Basic", and any of the high-contrast themes, but the important thing is to cycle through the two major types (those where DWM-Compositioning is enabled and those where it isn't). I know it sounds silly, but it's actually more fundamental than you'd think.

If that doesn't "shake something loose" within the menu-icon rendering, the link above contains instructions for enabling or disabling desktop compositioning manually (this is harmless, but again, it may shake the tree just enough to make the odd gremlin tumble to the ground and give his noggin a good whack like he deserves).

Yes, this was a very long post just to tell you to (in essence) "change your theme" - but I wanted to make it clear that I'm not just spouting rubbish suggestions like the 13-year-old boy/troll that I secretly long to be one last time before life's long decline begins to rob me of hope and hardiness.

[lank]

Thanks for the suggestions and extra information but I wasn't successful.

I do however now have some more information so that I can branch my search for a solution, although I doubt at this point I'll find anything.

I think what I need is for one of the developers of the programs to tell me what the actual calls are for the menu icons so I can narrow the issue. So far only one has tried but he said they use a third party utility for the sub menus and that the call is a "standard" Windows call.

Oh well....

[fuxs]

To be fair one should mention that there has been some helpful reaction on this MS thread in between. No solution (there might be no quick one though) but a bug reported (hopefully) and some MS guy tested on Win10 and reported back.

[nikos]

I had to make a lot of fuss at higher levels to get somebody "supervisor" to clip this guys ears

[RightPaddock]

I had to make a lot of fuss at higher levels to get somebody "supervisor" to clip this guys ears

A bit of bullying often works wonders ==>> http://forum.zabkat.com/viewtopic.php?p=63649#p63649

RP

[Tuxman]

IMO MS is going up instead. They're pushing forward, even making quite a lot of free (and really great) Android apps, placing their OneNote and OneDrive in a market where everyone thought the game is lost.

Expect them.