WPF: Menu items and combo boxes don't render in Windows 7 64-bit

Question

I'm trying to use an existing internal WPF application (I do have access to the source), but it was developed on XP and I'm using Windows7 64-bit.

When I click (for instance) the File menu, 90% of the time I see no drop-down menu at all. The menu still exists - I can use the arrow keys to navigate up and down and choose an option if I happen to know the order of the options, but nothing renders at all.

The other 10% of the time, the menu or some portion of it DOES render, but as I move the cursor up and down I get graphical corruption or disappearing options until I end up back at the "no menu is visible at all" state.

This is also true of combo boxes within the application - they show no data when I drop them down, but I can arrow down and choose an entry.

Microsoft has some advice about WPF rendering issues here but none of these steps has helped with my issue.

Edit: a coworker running Windows 7 sees the menus just fine... he has a different video card, so I'm curious whether this is video-card specific.

Answer 1

See this question. It's probably a problem with a DropShadowEffect, removing the Effect should fix the problem.

Answer 2

This also sounds similar to an issue we had seen in XP, where comboboxes (or menus) would not display properly some of the time. There is a Microsoft hotfix (for at least one flavor of it) here, but unfortunately it is for XP and WS2003. I'm not sure if this could point you in the right direction.

The link to this hotfix was found in this MSDN thread. I am not the author of this particular link, although I do remember raising this issue some time (and a different job) ago.

Answer 3

It turns out that in this specific case, the issue is only present on boxes that have a GeForce 6800 video card. Updating drivers has no effect, but switching to a 7800 makes the issue go away.

I have no idea why this is the case, and I haven't found any information online about 6800-specific graphical issues in Win7 64, but our testing and experimentation shows this is the factor that causes it.

Crazy.