WindowBlinds 10.5 Violently and Spontaneously Crashes Windows 10 Insider Preview Session

from Stardock Forums

Hey all, new ObjectDesktop customer. I gave WindowBlinds 10 a shot on my computer and it... did some interesting things to say the least. Upon first installing, things were fine. Then I selected a theme and boom, violent, spectacular crash of every process in the session. Very amusing to watch, honestly.

Here are some of the dialogs as everything rapidly crashes:

Photo 1

Photo 2

As you can imagine, it was not possible to get a screenshot. Absolutely every GUI window crashes. The Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen crashes. Personally, I'm surprised the WerFault dialogs were even working here.

So, obviously this is not Stardock's fault. I'm running Insider Previews. And nothing is forcing me to use WindowBlinds - indeed, I've had to uninstall WindowBlinds out of band simply to be able to login. I honestly just wanted to see what WindowBlinds was like, since the last time I even used it was as a kid. However, I cannot currently leave the Insider Preview - I need it for my work because I am relying on some syscall fixes in WSL that literally landed merely a month ago. So, I figure I may as well report this since I can't find any evidence that anyone else has yet. It'd be super swell if I could run WindowBlinds before the next Windows 10 stable release comes out in March of next year and allows me to leave Insider Preview hell. (Stardock are far from the only developers getting killed by Windows 10 updates - VirtualBox seems to die entirely nearly every other update, as an example.)

That all being said, here's a [slightly scrubbed] dump from Speccy about my configuration: Speccy dump

It is not possible to attach a debugger. I tried. The debugger crashes just as violently. So no minidumps unfortunately. If I had time, I'd try to get minidumps somehow.

windowblinds
116,314 views 36 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Dev would probably  need  the version number of the preview to work on a solution.

As for 10 crashing things in general.....the so-called stable releases do that with alacrity....you dont need to get all insidery just for that....;)

Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top


I've had to uninstall WindowBlinds out of band simply to be able to login
End of quote

Tip: If you hold down [Ctrl] at the login screen while you hit [Enter] it completely prevents Windowblinds from loading.  Sounds like it might come in handy for you.

Curtains - Customize Windows with additional styles
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Jafo, reply 1

Dev would probably  need  the version number of the preview to work on a solution.
End of Jafo's quote

It is the latest of the fast ring, also included in the huge Speccy dump. Or it would be, if it weren't for the fact that my Speccy dump appears to have been deleted off of Hastebin. That is incredibly odd. Oh well, i'll figure that out later. The build is 10.0.14971.

Quoting DaveRI, reply 2
Tip: If you hold down [Ctrl] at the login screen while you hit [Enter] it completely prevents Windowblinds from loading.  Sounds like it might come in handy for you.
End of DaveRI's quote

Indeed, that is quite useful. Thanks.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top


Hey all, new ObjectDesktop customer. I gave WindowBlinds 10 a shot on my computer and it... did some interesting things to say the least. Upon first installing, things were fine. Then I selected a theme and boom, violent, spectacular crash of every process in the session. Very amusing to watch, honestly.

Here are some of the dialogs as everything rapidly crashes:

Photo 1

Photo 2

As you can imagine, it was not possible to get a screenshot. Absolutely every GUI window crashes. The Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen crashes. Personally, I'm surprised the WerFault dialogs were even working here.

So, obviously this is not Stardock's fault. I'm running Insider Previews. And nothing is forcing me to use WindowBlinds - indeed, I've had to uninstall WindowBlinds out of band simply to be able to login. I honestly just wanted to see what WindowBlinds was like, since the last time I even used it was as a kid. However, I cannot currently leave the Insider Preview - I need it for my work because I am relying on some syscall fixes in WSL that literally landed merely a month ago. So, I figure I may as well report this since I can't find any evidence that anyone else has yet. It'd be super swell if I could run WindowBlinds before the next Windows 10 stable release comes out in March of next year and allows me to leave Insider Preview hell. (Stardock are far from the only developers getting killed by Windows 10 updates - VirtualBox seems to die entirely nearly every other update, as an example.)

That all being said, here's a [slightly scrubbed] dump from Speccy about my configuration: Speccy dump

It is not possible to attach a debugger. I tried. The debugger crashes just as violently. So no minidumps unfortunately. If I had time, I'd try to get minidumps somehow.
End of quote

I quickly checked here with 14971 and WindowBlinds is working normally here. This suggests a conflict between something else on your computer and WindowBlinds.

Do you have any specific Antivirus software running as 9 times out of 10 they are involved in this kind of problem.

I should also check you installed WindowBlinds 10.50 and not the much earlier WindowBlinds 10.0.6 or even earlier (which will blow up on insider builds since June 2016).

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

I have no anti-virus software whatsoever.

It is really WindowBlinds 10.5.0. I tested again downloading the standalone installer. No beans.

Looking for other potential causes, but I'm currently very confused.

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting johnchadwick, reply 5

I have no anti-virus software whatsoever.

It is really WindowBlinds 10.5.0. I tested again downloading the standalone installer. No beans.

Looking for other potential causes, but I'm currently very confused.
End of johnchadwick's quote

It is odd as we have a VM and a physical machine with that build and everything is happy.

You could exclude windbg from WindowBlinds and see if you can catch it in a crash via that and then get a dmp which might prove useful.  You might want to exclude explorer.exe, taskmgr and dwm.exe first just for convenience when things blow up. 

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

Same issue ... on the Preview Build (14971) and installed WindowBlinds 10.5 (029 - Windows 10 Edition) and as soon as I try to change from the default it crashes. Multiple Error alerts ... black screen and I have to CTRL+ALT+DEL to log myself out and use the CTRL method to log back in and change back to default.  No 3rd party anti-virus...

Willing to help to get this to work but I am not sure what info you need from me.

 

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting aarongurgens, reply 7

Same issue ... on the Preview Build (14971) and installed WindowBlinds 10.5 (029 - Windows 10 Edition) and as soon as I try to change from the default it crashes. Multiple Error alerts ... black screen and I have to CTRL+ALT+DEL to log myself out and use the CTRL method to log back in and change back to default.  No 3rd party anti-virus...

Willing to help to get this to work but I am not sure what info you need from me.

 
End of aarongurgens's quote

Are you on 32 or 64 bit and was this a clean install or an upgrade of Windows?

What other applications are you using, what display setting are you using, and what theme did you pick?  If you use the included Modern theme do you have issues?

Also what does it say on the about WindowBlinds page (you can copy and paste the text here)

Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top

Hey again, wow, sorry, it turns out it is actually pretty darn hard to get a debugger attached when you have a single Windows machine. Nothing I can do will allow me to switch users without entirely terminating the session. However, I figured out that despite all of the mayhem, almost shockingly, WER was working correctly. With that knowledge, I flipped on the automatic usermode minidumps and ran into a crash, and sure enough it loaded my dump folder with over a gigabyte of dumps in practically no time (these were full dumps.)

Both for logistic and privacy reasons, I'd prefer to rule out the low-hanging fruit before I send a full dump, but I do have a bunch of them. I loaded a dump of explorer.exe crashing into Visual Studio 2017 rc1 and so far I haven't identified anything that jumps out to me, as a person unfamiliar with how WindowBlinds works. If WindowBlinds is conflicting with another installed piece of software, it's not immediately obvious which.

It looks like the following apps are loading into Explorer.exe's process space:

  • Stardock DeskScapes
  • Stardock Start10 (+ Shell extension)
  • Stardock WindowBlinds (duhh)
  • Google Drive Sync
  • Adobe Creative Cloud CoreSync
  • Dropbox
  • NVidia drivers (nvwgf2umx.dll, nvapi64.dll)
  • Defraggler
  • 7-zip
  • Microsoft OneDrive

None of this is particularly shocking. I am guessing the only thing that has probability of coming into play here is the NVidia drivers, but testing that theory would be painful as this is my daily driver. Nonetheless, I'm about to reboot with the drivers disabled to see if that does anything interesting...

I did not notice my Wacom tablet drivers there, which sort-of surprised me. Maybe it's just not on this test user account I'm using, but I would've expected those to be here.

Anyway, here's the full dump of modules: http://pastebin.com/raw/UEvJLy02

I think the callstack may be interesting. It looks like on the top frame we're kind of out in the middle of nowhere: http://i.imgur.com/lKJOWAv.png
I'm no Intel assembly expert, but I am pretty sure that 'add byte ptr [rax],al' is Intel syntax for what translates to '0x00 0x00.' Indeed, I just switched on 'Show Code Bytes' and that's what I'm seeing. Aside from this being nonsensical, I think that confirms we're jumping to the wrong place. What's more interesting is that I do see what appears to be meaningful code just a few bytes away. Maybe what we're seeing is WindowBlinds accidentally missing a jump to some sort of generated code (a trampoline?) - the int 9fh is probably the most fascinating, but I am going to preemptively assume there's some proprietary WindowBlinds stuff going on there that I shouldn't know about.
 
This is all probably sounding stupid and useless; pardon my utter lack of knowledge in Windows internals and Stardock software. I will keep tweaking variables to see if we can nail down exactly what causes this.
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Quoting aarongurgens, reply 7

Same issue ... on the Preview Build (14971) and installed WindowBlinds 10.5 (029 - Windows 10 Edition) and as soon as I try to change from the default it crashes. Multiple Error alerts ... black screen and I have to CTRL+ALT+DEL to log myself out and use the CTRL method to log back in and change back to default.  No 3rd party anti-virus...

 
End of aarongurgens's quote

I have an ongoing case (#IRO-455-93995) with support about this. Switching WindowFX (6.02) on causes the same BTW.

Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
Quoting c242, reply 10
Quoting aarongurgens,
reply 7

Same issue ... on the Preview Build (14971) and installed WindowBlinds 10.5 (029 - Windows 10 Edition) and as soon as I try to change from the default it crashes. Multiple Error alerts ... black screen and I have to CTRL+ALT+DEL to log myself out and use the CTRL method to log back in and change back to default.  No 3rd party anti-virus...

 



I have an ongoing case (#IRO-455-93995) with support about this. Switching WindowFX (6.02) on causes the same BTW.

End of c242's quote

That is odd that both apps could cause that.  I know that particular build of Win10 seems pretty buggy based on what I have seen with repainting in a VMWare session.

Have you filed a bug with Microsoft?

Please also make sure to tell support you are using insider builds.  We don't offer support on those (for good reasons as they are often horribly buggy).

Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top

Since yesterday I did make an attempt to uninstall all of the other software I saw injecting itself into/being loaded by Explorer, to no avail. I also noticed the problem with WindowFX as well, last night. Anyways, if the official position is that these Insider builds are just plain broken and no further investigation is desired, I'll just uninstall everything and call it a day. I think there's little more I can do aside from trying to piece together what exactly is failing here. Indeed, it could be next to anything causing this. Of course, I created this thread with the intent of not trying to waste anyone's time, but hopefully catch a bug that would impact WindowBlinds users in a future production release of Windows, and if you want any debug information I do have some fairly large dumps I can send; just let me know how to do that.

I'll keep flipping switches here and there to see if I can figure it out. The weird jump into apparently-nowhere is bugging me a lot. Maybe something about my system setup is causing some hardware or kernel behavior to change in an unexpected way? I do have HyperV enabled come to think of it - I have no idea how that'd impact any usermode stuff but I'll try switching it off just in case.

Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top

Well i'll be. HyperV causes the crash.

So there you go, enabling HyperV seems to cause a problem in the WindowBlinds injection. If this is a known issue, then I deeply apologize. I was using Docker for Windows and hadn't even thought about the consequences of HyperV being enabled. In any case, I am sure you can now reproduce the problem and will not need my help, but i will still assist in debugging if there is anything you need me to do. If this is Microsoft's fault, maybe it is time to file a bug.

+2 Loading…
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top

That is interesting. 

c242: Are you also running with HyperV enabled?

Regarding the insider builds:  Posts reporting issues on the forums are fine and we will work with people to see if things can be addressed (especially if they are technical and can run tests if needed), but formal support obviously cannot be offered as we are working with a moving target which may have its own bugs.

We had a run of Fences being broken in one insider build, fixed in the next and then broken in the following one!  Supporting that is simply not possible.

Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top

If you have a dmp file from a crash it would be interesting to see.  You can private message me a link to one if you can upload it.

Reply #16 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Yes, Hyper-V here, too. Hm, support sent me the Stardock diagnosis-tool and I haven't heard from them for 3 days. Maybe my Insider-Build is the reason ?

I also thought about just vanilla install 1607 and stay away from the insider thing on my productive Laptop (I know,  I know,,, ;-) )

Reply #17 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Disabled Hyper-V -> NO PROBLEMS anymore. :-)

 

Will report this to Microsoft.

Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting c242, reply 17

Disabled Hyper-V -> NO PROBLEMS anymore. :)

 

Will report this to Microsoft.
End of c242's quote

To both of you reporting the issue: How exactly are you running the Insider build?

I enabled HyperV inside a VMWare Workstation 10 install of the insider builds and am not having any issues.

More information on your exact setup would be very useful indeed.

Reply #19 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Mine is at support already. ;-)

I run the Insider build on a physical machine (Laptop with hybrid AMD/Intel graphics and 32 GB) .

 

 

Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top

Also did you have to enable hyper-v on your installs, or was it on automatically?

Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top

I am pretty sure I had to enable it manually. Specifically, though, it was enabled by installing Docker for Windows, which uses Hyper-V to run a Mobylinux VM. Even without that VM present, WindowBlinds goes out of control.

Reply #23 from WinCustomize Forums Top

As I need Hyper-V for business I had it enabled. Only deactivated it for testing this thread outcome.

Reply #24 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting c242, reply 23

As I need Hyper-V for business I had it enabled. Only deactivated it for testing this thread outcome.
End of c242's quote

Do you have other Stardock software like Start10 or Deskscapes installed?

I would be curious to know if they are also having issues.

Reply #25 from Stardock Forums Top

As for me, so far I've only seen WindowFX and WindowBlinds exhibit this particular issue. I have Start10, DeskScapes, and Fences running, all of which were fine with Hyper-V. Though fences is a bit buggy in the current Windows Insider. I can install the entire Object Desktop suite if you want me to test the whole shebang.