OK first of all I started having problems when I got Visual C++ .NET. When it was running, eventually I would start getting GUI graphic glitches. Most noticably in the taskbar. These glitches usually were wrong GUI elements being drawn in the wrong spot. Sometimes I would see random GUI elements or windows being rendered in the upper left corner of the screen (Windows was trying to use it as a secondary screen page?). I figured Windowblinds was conflicting with VC++ so I restarted Windowblinds. But the problem immediately came back! Strangely, explorer.exe crashed soon after and the problem disappeared for a bit, but soon came back.

Then the glitches started getting weirder. Sometimes Windows couldn't load fonts for a dialog so it had the ugly big default font. Sometimes a window would have an invisible border until I clicked it. Sometimes I would open a dialog and the entire screen would be painted with the dialog color.

Then it the glitches stopped being just graphical. The right side of my start menu blacked out and become inoperative. Then, just today, it got really bad.

I forget what I was doing but all of a sudden Windows made about 12 or so error sounds and the whole screen started going crazy. It stopped eventually, but not until it disconnected all my internet connections (I never was able to reconnect some of them until reboot).

It happened again when I went to answer an e-mail. I went to type in the reply field, and the browser's client area (where the web content is rendered)'s upper left corner snapped to 0,0, and every character I typed showed up as a space and triggered an error beep. Then everything started glitching out, and I got tons of error beeps. No matter what keys I hit I couldn'(most of the time I couldn't even see the mouse) it did no good, I could tell I was minimizing all windows, etc, but it wasn't having any effect. I eventually mashed ALT+F4 and stuff started working again. However I saw a few new error boxes I hadn't seen before, like "Cannot open DC" (Device Context, needed when a program wants to paint a window) and "Cannot create DIB" (bitmap object) in the ugly, default font

Then I went to print my homework, and it happened AGAIN when I hit print. I was forced to close everything again with ALT+F4. I went to print again and it still happened. I figured I had had enough at that point.

I tried to close Windowblinds and VC++ now, but the computer seemed to be running slowly. I eventually was forced to close Windowblinds, VC++, and Explorer before the problem almost went away.

Except it had stilll left behind aftereffects. It somehow messed up the printer drivers, and I could no longer print. I just got a generic error message. And I couldn't use the internet anymore. So I decided to reboot.

When I booted into Windows, the printer then promptly spewed out exactly two lines of the paper I had tried to print.

Oh and by the way, this wasn't Windows 98FE or ME or anything. This was Windows XP. I can honestly say I've NEVER seen it spaz out like that before.

http://www.debian.org



[BTW, I wasnt kidding... ;)]

Dang, I've never heard of this happening before, especially not with XP. It reminds me of this (which hopefully you might find amusing)! :p

considering that Windows is patched together from stuff that MS copied/bought/acquired, its amazing that it even works as well as it does.

I'd say really, try Debian. It's a refresher, and you'd probably love it.

Then go back to XP when you're ready. Seriously.

I'm gonna Debian up my desktop over easter as a project to retain my santity whilst revising for my finals. It will also probably render it unusable to my family (It lives at home and my laptop, the lovebale Geoff, comes with me to uni).

But they've all got their own machines anyway.

Actually, thinking about it, there are three PCs and two laptops at home, even with Geoff here in Durham. That's a lot of PC's for a family!

But yeah, when I've got the time I plan to dabble.

Hahaha, I have a much better link than all of those the above people mentioned!


http://housecall.trendmicro.com

Seriously, that's a virus or some sort of malware. Not that Windowblinds is particularly well-programmed or anything, but Visual Studio *is* and has never caused any problem on any of my systems whatsoever (and I've run it on... oh... 6 completely different hardware configurations and under 6 different versions of Windows not including betas).

I did a virus scan and a spyware scan, nothing turned up.

And my system is 100% ok now. :p

It might be some other idiosyncracy with my system that caused the conflict between VC++ and Windowblinds.

The thing is tho, VB.NET didn't cause any of this ever.

Maybe it's one of the custom .NET controls I'm using in my app.

As for Debian, I was mostly joking about the Linux thing, sorry guys. :p

But I have been dabbling in Knoppix. I just don't feel like going to partition my HD right now anyways (I only have like 9gb free).

I have Visual Studio 6 on my computer, and the only problem is that there's a 1 in a million chance that it'll corrupt and then delete your project (in VBasic, anyway). It's happened to me once so far, and I've seen it (including my own) do it three times on three different computers.

Don't use MS development apps, they do not gie you appropriate control over the system. IF you still want to use Windows I recommend either setting up a dual boot setup for your development, VMWare, or perhaps even cygwin (although development in cygwin is lousy). As for your windows buggin out situation, all signs poing to a virus/other malware infection. I wouldn't count of any single virus scan to be 100% effective at catching it, either - especially since studies of spyware scanners have indicated very poor results accross the board. IF all else fails reformat - it's your best friend sometimes.


All that said, I don't use Windows any more - too expensive - I'm a cheapskate....

WTF?

Visual Studio is, by far, one of the best development apps out there.

You, sir, are screwed in the head.

And yet it's way too expensive. There are viable free alternatives which are nearly as good.

It's not that expensive. What, 25 dollars to students? And really, if you aren't a student, you probably won't have much need for it. Unless you run a business. And in that case, you can afford it (or if you can't, you've gotta ask yourself if you really have the funds to be starting a business).

Not to mention, having used both, trust me, Visual Studio is far superior to the most popular of the free alternatives (Dev-C++)

I use Eclipse for everything. I think it's far better than Dev-c++.. Can't say anything about VS because I've never used it.

Dev-C++ confoosed me when I tried to use it in my first year at uni.

Student Licences > *

I use VC++ at school and besides the GUI being a little clunky, I've never had problems with it.

I know this has already been beaten to death, but I thought I'd toss my two cents in.


WHAT?!?!!

Visual Studio is the most powerful IDE on the market. Absolutely everybody uses it for commercial development. Besides being a fairly smooth text editor and having intuitive autotabbing it has absolutely extraordinary debugging features (local, network, you can even run networked debugging on embedded devices). There simply are no alternatives.

Hell, even Microsoft developers have identified Visual Studio as one of the most important advantages Windows has over UNIX, and they aren't kidding. They probably spend more money on it than they do on the OS itself.