Rick Brewster

The plugin is gaslighting you 😮

You have sharpening enabled in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

If you're tired of clicking on the update prompts, you can buy the app on the Microsoft Store and then updates will be completely transparent -- it happens automatically and in the background. https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NBHCS1LX4R0 This is the way software works nowadays: continuous improvement, continuous release. It results in higher quality software, and reduces "big surprise" updates with lots of new, but not always completely working, functionality. It reduces the amount of time that people have to deal with bugs that do arise. Complaining about the frequency of updates for free software is a pretty silly attitude to have, "Hey there's a bug can you fix it" (so then I fix it immediately) ... "Hey why are you sending out so many updates?!" Pick a lane ...

Have you installed the 4.2.8 update?

This small update fixes a few pressing bugs, particularly for touch and pen input. If you’re using the Windows Store release, you should get the update automatically within the next 24 hours. You can also force an update check by following these instructions. For the Classic release, you should be offered the update automatically within the next week or so. You can get the update sooner by going to ⚙ Settings → Updates → Check Now. You can also download and install it directly from the website. Changes since 4.2.7: Fixed: Pinch-to-zoom was not working when using a touch screen (regression in 4.2.6) Fixed: Spacebar panning was not working when using a pen/stylus (regression in 4.2.6) Fixed: EXIF metadata with non-ASCII characters is now preserved correctly Fixed a crash that can happen when the Microsoft Store version of the app is closed for an update Added /repair command-line argument, which will run PdnRepair.exe. This makes it easy to use Start -> Run -> paintdotnet:/repair so you don't have to go fishing for the installation directory. Enjoy!

Locking -- new update incoming!

BTW this probably works a lot better in the latest version (currently 4.2.7). I've put in a whole bunch of metadata related work into the 4.2 series of updates.

4.2.8 will at least fix the pinch-to-zoom. For the other issues, if you made a video showing what's happening, that would really help me to investigate and debug it.

Updated

Is there a particular reason you ask? I don't usually align updates on any particular holiday schedule. I'm currently working on a 4.2.8 update to fix a few small things, but I don't have anything planned (or not) for New Year. Updates just happen when they happen

Sounds like the Sharpening setting was enabled in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

The answer makes more sense if you think in the context of when it was written ... which, IIRC, was after a very heavy spam bot attack on the forum

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Glad it's working again!

Exception details: System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt. at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex..cctor() From the looks of it, my guess is that some system file is corrupt. Try repairing the .NET Framework. Also run chkdsk, and sfc /scannow

It sounds like what you really want is a "File -> Export" or "File -> Save a Copy" feature. @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth was working on this earlier in the year but development stalled on some design/workflow questions, and I haven't given it enough attention or priority. It's a popular feature request, I should probably get back to it now that a lot of other work has been completed and it's not quite yet time for work on 4.3 to ramp up fully. FWIW I've been looking into how to make general history operations a lot faster (which will make your save workflow faster). Right now it's bottlenecked by being synchronous ("not in the background"), by the CPU speed of NTFS compression, and then lastly by disk speed (almost all SSDs aren't bottlenecked at all here though). I can make it a lot faster, but it either takes a lot more disk space and disk activity, or a lot more memory. Right now I'm minimizing memory, minimizing disk space use and disk activity, but maximizing human waiting time and CPU time. It's no longer the right compromise. If I had to pick 1 thing for you to invest in it would be RAM. Thankfully RAM is really cheap right now! You can grab a pair of 8GB DDR4-2666 sticks (16GB total) for about $50 USD: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007611 600521523 600006072 600561671&Order=PRICE

I'll be fixing this in a 4.2.8 update that I'll be sending out soon -- but, I'm stuck at a hotel surrounded by snow, so it may be a little while!

This has nothing to do with the hotfix

You have multiple monitors, I take it? Do they have different DPI/scaling settings? That will definitely cause weird docking stuff to happen.

The plugins probably have updates. You can just install the newer versions. Old versions of Paint.NET are not made available and are not supported. It's very helpful if you tell us if you have plugins that don't work anymore so that we can figure out how to get them to work again.

Locking -- new version inbound Edit: Released:

This is a hotfix that address a crash at startup that was happening on some systems. If you’re using the Windows Store release, you should get the update automatically within the next 48 hours. You can also force an update check by following these instructions. For the Classic release, you should be offered the update automatically within the next week or so. You can get the update sooner by going to ⚙ Settings → Updates → Check Now. You can also download and install it directly from the website. Changes since 4.2.6: Fixed a crash at startup (FileLoadException) due to 1) the stub for System.Runtime.dll not being updated, and 2) the rigid version binding policy that prevented the older version from working in its stead (which would've been fine in this case). And, because this is a hotfix, here are the changes from 4.2.5: Improved the input handling systems to use WM_POINTER, which enables glitch-free drawing when using a pen or stylus (e.g. Surface Pen, Wacom/Ugee tablet) (see here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/113173-the-first-5mm-of-a-freehand-line-are-straight-when-using-a-tablet/ ). This will also be the basis for adding pressure sensitivity in a future release (v4.3). Added a "Native pointer input" setting if a "pointer" device is available (pen, tablet, touch screen). Disabling this will cause any pointer device to be emulated as a mouse, which may be more compatible but at the cost of smoothness. Pointer devices are listed in Settings -> Diagnostics. Removed the "Fluid mouse input" setting because the use of GetMouseMovePointsEx() has been removed (it's a very buggy and broken API). This finally fixes a number of weird issues related to erratic or "scribbly" drawing. Improved performance of Move Selected Pixels, Shapes, and Gradient tools when releasing the mouse button at the end of drag-and-drop gesture. Previously, anything rendered between the last mouse "move" and "up" events was re-rendered, resulting in the appearance of a delay/lag. Greatly improved performance of layer thumbnails when switching between images Improved: The image list at the top can now be scrolled by clicking the arrow buttons and holding the mouse down, just like a regular scroll bar button. (Previously you had to click repeatedly). This improves usability, but was also noted as being important for accessibility. Improved: Smooth scrolling animations have been removed from the image list and layers list due to them just not working very well. Improved window chrome/theming when the app is running in Remote Desktop on Windows 10 Changed: The size of the default/initial image ("Untitled") is now scaled exactly by system DPI setting (previously scaled by integer/floor of DPI setting). So at 150% DPI scaling this image will now be 1200x900 instead of 800x600. Fixed some high-DPI layout bugs with the Layer Properties dialog, while also preparing this UI for future additions Fixed a crash (OutOfVideoMemoryException) on systems with hybrid GPU setups that are configured wrong. This seems to be a bug in Windows and DirectX. A "hybrid GPU" setup is an Intel iGPU or AMD APU paired with a discrete GPU in a laptop. Improved handling of the dreaded "NoHardwareDeviceException" crash: The user will be notified of how to fix this. It happens only on 2nd generation Intel Core systems with NVIDIA "Optimus" GPUs (GeForce or Quadro) when the NVIDIA Control Panel is set to force apps (or just Paint.NET) to use the NVIDIA GPU. This is a bug in the NVIDIA driver and/or in DirectX. Fixed images being pasted incorrectly from Outlook 2016/365. This is actually a bug in Outlook: it puts PNGs on the clipboard that are arbitrarily cropped and scaled for some reason, and specifies they are the preferred format to use when pasting. This completely boggles my mind, it's just really weird, I can't imagine why it's done this way. Fixed some clipboard image handling for plugins (regular Copy/Paste is unaffected) Changed: SSE2 is now required for 32-bit/x86 systems (prevously, only SSE was required). See blog post: https://blog.getpaint.net/2019/10/14/paint-net-v4-2-6-will-require-sse2-on-32-bit-x86/ Updated bundled WebPFileType plugin to v1.3.1.0 (thanks @null54) Updated bundled DDSFileTypePlus plugin to v1.9.8.0 (thanks @null54!)

Just a quick note that I've removed 4.2.6 from the auto-updater because I'm getting a lot of crash reports. See my blog post here: https://blog.getpaint.net/2019/11/25/paint-net-4-2-6-rollout-suspended-4-2-7-soon/ If you've already installed 4.2.6 and it's working fine then there's nothing to worry about.

PdnRepair and/or a reboot is what I've seen fixes this. I should be able to have this fixed up for the next update. I'm not sure if it'll be a proper fix, or a "detect this and offer a button to auto-fix it" kind of solution.

Also, @TGolisch, do you know if you were working with images of type DDS, TGA, or WebP? I have another hypothesis that the Paint.NET shell extension, which provides thumbnails for these in Explorer, was still loaded in memory and was locking that file (System.Runtime.dll). I'm betting that the copy of System.Runtime.dll you have is dated 2019-03-18 with a size of 37 KB, version 4.0.0.0, which is what came with v4.2.5. However, v4.2.6 has a copy that is dated 2019-09-25 of size 29 KB, version 4.1.2.0. I don't believe there's any harm in leaving your edited .exe.config in place, but it shouldn't be necessary once this is all figured out.

That's super useful information, thanks! Could you ZIP up your installation directory and send it to me? I'm trying to figure out an automatic fix for this. I did get a someone's installation fixed by running PdnRepair, but I'm pretty sure something is wonky with the MSI that Visual Studio is generating. I think there's a file that's missing or something. You can e-mail it to me, https://www.getpaint.net/contact.html , or even just post it here, maybe use a cloud storage thingy like Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox.