Not working alongside WindowBlinds anymore

[Eleiyas]

Ok guys!

 

I have had Stardock's Windowblinds for the longest time and Paint.Net would work fine. I then did a windows update and I then updated paint.net as my version was a few months out of date.

It then stopped working and I couldn't figure out why and this issue had been plaguing me for weeks at this point.

 

I noticed my Windows update was broken and thought it was maybe a broken .NET framework or something, so I fixed all that and Paint.Net still would not work. It would open, but as soon as I loaded an image, the whole thing would freeze and need to be nuked in Process Hacker or Task Manager.

 

I then noticed a forum thread on here from 2019 where an Admin mentioned WindowBlinds. I unloaded my skin and low-and-behold now Paint.Net works

 

I am almost certain it worked alongside Windowblinds in a previous version, now it doesn't. It's quite annoying that I now have to unload my skin when I want to use Paint.net, so could this be fixed at all?

[BoltBait]

11 minutes ago, Eleiyas said:

could this be fixed at all?

 

Yes.

 

Contact the makers of Windowblinds.

[Rick Brewster]

Well you've already found the solution.

 

By definition WindowBlinds is a total hack, and an invasive one at that. It's basically malware. It constantly causes all sorts of problems for its users, as evidenced by the regular stream of issues that are reported here on the forums. I will never make any code changes or "fixes" on behalf of WindowBlinds. They broke it, they get to fix it.

 

My advice is to delete that piece of trash. Not unless you want an unstable system that is constantly making you question what in the world is going wrong with it. Personally, my time is way more valuable than having glitzy or goofy looking window styling. You lost weeks troubleshooting this? Yuck. Just delete it. If you think it's annoying that you have to unload your theme, imagine how annoying it would be for me to be regularly wasting hours and days on reverse-engineering their garbage and retconning fixes into my app.

 

Anyway, IMO. It is impressive garbage, but it's still garbage.

[KittyPause]

@Rick Brewster  Wow!  You sound super upset that Stardock has a program which thousands of us enjoy.  Not to take away from your program which is nice (awful coloring / effects, but great everything else), but HOURS have INDEED gone into customizing my desktop(s) to where they look amazing .... and NO, I am not going to delete the program which helps accomplish this (one of the only such programs on the market, BTW) and which I have used for YEARS, so that I can use a program that does what 17,486 other programs do - ESPECIALLY, when, as the OP already mentioned, they have always worked together (for me, for two years until last night when I cleaned up some Microsoft Visual CC++ Redist. files).  Fix it or not; that's your prerogative but shut the f*ck up in attempting to tell people what they should opt for on their machines.

[Rick Brewster]

[quote]HOURS have INDEED gone into customizing my desktop(s) to where they look amazing[/quote]

This is news to me -- didn't realize people spent that much time on such a thing. TIL!

 

But, no, I can both admire and facepalm over an app like WindowBlinds. Like I said, it's technically impressive, but it's also something of an invasive species.

 

If things are broken due to WB, it's up to WB to fix the glitch. I've already explained this and my position has not changed.

 

PDN deploys VC++ redist locally, it does not use any system-wide copies of it.

 

And no, I will not "shut the f*ck up". For having said something like that, you get a ban. Goodbye.