on some Windows machines, skinned applications sometimes loses their skin. any ideas?

Question

Hi

we are developing a skinned application, and under vista/windows 7, on some machines, skinned applications sometimes loses their skin. here's an example for the problem, and here's how the application looks when it's good.

this happens to us whether we develop with native Win32 API or in QT. It happens spontanously, with no event that might explain it. btw, we see it happens sometimes to some other applications, too

we solve it by repainting everything every 2-3 seconds. but this is an ugly hack...

any ideas why this could happen?

thanks _very_much_ for any lead -

Lior

Answer 1

Shot in the dark, but it sounds like a graphics driver problem. I'd check whether the problematic machines all have the same graphics card or the same version of the graphics driver, and how the driver collection on those machines compares with the OK ones.

Answer 2

Shot in the dark #2: You're running out of GDI resources because your app (or another app running on the same machine) is leaking GDI handles.

It's been while since I've had to use any tools for detecting "GDI handle leaks" (Google or Bing on it).

Here's some links to go read up on:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301756.aspx

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/gdi_handles.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188782.aspx