RAD Studio 2010 And DWM In Windows 7

It’s been a while that I noticed a problem with RAD Studio 2010 which occasionally appears. It seems sometimes when RAD Studio 2010 is being loaded, it does something that affects DWM (Windows desktop manager in Vista and Windows 7). That causes the graphical user interface of RAD Studio – and sometimes other applications – to be drawn distorted! Take a look at the screenshot bellow:

RAD Studio 2010 Distorted Graphical User Interface

This continues until I terminate dwm.exe process forcefully. Terminating dwm.exe restarts Windows desktop manager, and after that, everything’s fine. I haven’t dug into this problem to see what really causes this, because it is so random, and I cannot reproduce it.

I was going to report it in Quality Central, but since Embarcadero banned accessing to its website services from Iran, and I wasn’t in the mood to use any tool to change my IP to workaround this silly prohibition to log a report; I decided to blog about it rather than reporting it in QC.

BTW, I have this problem on a machine with ATI graphics card, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installed on it. My RAD Studio 2010 also has all published updates installed.

Post Script: It seems it has nothing to do with RAD Studio; it must be my ATI graphics card, or its driver. I had the problem a few more times in other applications too, but I haven’t seen it recently. Maybe it is been fixed in the driver updates.