Help!! WB is messing up my computer!! (with screenshots)

I don't know what to do anymore... I tried everything!

Friday, December 16, 2005 by Link632 | Discussion: WindowBlinds

I have been using WB5 for about 4 days now and I haven't gotten any types of errors, whatsoever, up until a few hours ago.. I didn't even do a thing! I was using Mormegil's ChristmasTime theme (and ran it for 4 days without errors), then when I decided to come to WinCustomize.com to browse for new Objects and such, my computer hung up on me! I don't know if that had anything to do with my visiting wincustomize.com, but it couldn't have been a virus or a spyware because I just performed a general maintenance on my computer a few hours earlier (and I have been doing that since January).. Then I restarted my computer using the button on my CPU and when I entered my Windows XP account, the entire "start" bar below (the whole thing, not just the start button, but the entire bar -- sorry, i have no idea what it's called) didn't even show up! The only thing that showed up was the digital clock, and that's it.. Ok, hold on.. I don't know where I'm going anymore. I think it's better if I just show you a screenshot and maybe you can just help me out and tell me what's wrong (also, I tried uninstalling+re-installing WB5, but apparently, that didn't fix my problem)..

http://tinypic.com/ionkf5.jpg

That's my whole screen.. No "start button" and the entire "bar" at the bottom of the screen is messed up! WB also got rid of my Windows XP theme.. I tried accessing through desktop/right-click/bah blah but then that didn't work.. all it's showing me is nothing (sorry, I'm really, really sleepy and i have been trying to fix this problem since 5 PM (and now it's about (9:00).. so, that should explain why my grammar is skewed. i haven't even eaten yet!) I tried righ clicking on "My Computer" and going to "Manage" / "Services" / etc. (as one poster explained in another thread), but that didn't work -- it didn't bring my Windows XP theme back..

Please help me! I am totally clueless about what's going on! And once again, excuse the grammar. I'm typing this up real fast because I'm about to collapse.. I really hope you guys can help me! Please!

Moderator Note:

This issue is caused by the cracked version of WindowBlinds.  Don't run the cracked version of WindowBlinds and this won't happen.

394 Reply 71 Referrals
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Neil Banfield
Reply #341 Thursday, December 22, 2005 4:37 AM
Agrippa: We are still looking in that problem, but if you do want a refund you need to contact [email protected] explaining the problem & that you would like a refund.

Neil Banfield
Reply #342 Thursday, December 22, 2005 4:41 AM

Exstacy: It sounds like your PC ran out of system resources.  That would explain the non painting & the inability to open wbconfig.  It would also explain the gradual sluggishness as the more resources in use, the slower things run.

Is this still happening after a reboot?


MSethWeisberg
Reply #343 Thursday, December 22, 2005 4:46 AM
Well I know that with WB4.6 and Kerio I did have to exclude it to get it to work right.

Exstasty...One thing I did notice with your WB5 trouble shoot info...don't know what that means is that while the files have the same dates as mine 2 of them have different time stamps.

See what I mean:

WindowBlinds 5.0 System Information Report:
STATUS : WB+ SRV+ HLP+ UI+ TRAY+
WindowBlinds is installed correctly on this PC.
WindowBlinds appears to be activated on this PC
Your machine supports per pixel borders on WindowBlinds skins.
You have one monitor in total.
Plug and Play Monitor) 1 is attached to RADEON 9600 SERIES
Wblind.dll 2005/12/20 22:41:38
Wbsrv.dll 2005/12/20 22:57:44
Wbconfig.exe 2005/12/05 18:42:52
Wbload.exe 2005/12/21 00:04:40
Wbhelp.dll 2004/09/18 13:37:00
Wbui.dll 2005/12/06 21:29:06
Tray.dll 2005/11/02 11:28:26

I honestly dontly don't know what that means....it looks like we have the same build installed.

Agrippa
Reply #344 Thursday, December 22, 2005 5:16 AM
Neil: If it's an investigation in progress, I don't mind waiting for a while. WB 5 is way cool and I'd certainly prefer to keep it. As long as there's hope of a solution, I'll hang on there for now.

Neil Banfield
Reply #345 Thursday, December 22, 2005 5:43 AM

Agrippa: Do you get a BSOD on WB unload, or just on skin change.

If not on unload, what happens when you then reload WB?


CRasH180
Reply #346 Thursday, December 22, 2005 6:35 AM
Neil: Yes, it appeared to only be the taskbar that was painted incorrectly. After I removed the "trial" version of Panda Antivirus, it worked without a problem. All I did was to uninstall Windows Blinds v5, uninstall Antivirus, and re-install Window Blinds 5. I performed a reboot after each of those steps prior to performing the next step.

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central

Jafo
Reply #347 Thursday, December 22, 2005 6:58 AM
CRasH180 ...if you have WB working well now....might I suggest AVG as an Antivirus alternative....it's definitely happy with WB....and the free ver is more than good enough [doesn't do nasty things like Norton did on mine]...

Agrippa
Reply #348 Thursday, December 22, 2005 7:19 AM
Unloading and reapplying same theme works just fine it seems. Only tested once, but still. Also, not all settings crash me when applied or removed, although once again I'm off to bed so no time for testing specifics now.

If you want me to test any specific settings changes, just say.

TheLain
Reply #349 Thursday, December 22, 2005 8:04 AM
Exstacy: how much virtual memory have you assigned to your system? Maybe your HDD has run out of space or the swap file size is too small for your system.

When you open your Taskmanager (ctrl+alt+del) and go to the system performance tab - what does it show for your virtual memory?

Exstasy
Reply #350 Thursday, December 22, 2005 9:38 AM
Ok i was half dead last night and frustrated with all of this
As for my anti-virus i use NOD32 , Kerio is my firewall and i never had trouble with WB on any time using either of these programs
It was a sudden thing....... my taskbar was painted fine , EVERY other part was not , then when i rebooted , the entire explorer shell will not skin.
WBConfig.exe upon executing 99% of the time shuts down the second i open it.
As for my system and its resources , in no way that could happen. And yes like i said it rebooted and this was the result , still is after 3 reboots.

TheLain i have my VM set for 1536MB Limit.

Neil i can do any series of test you need , dxdiag has been done i just didnt post the entire thing

Athletic i dont know what to tell you there , but mine is 100% straight download from SDCentral always has been. I have a archive of all past versions i had installed before i update so no clue.
I tried uninstalling reverting to the past one i had installed and then tried updating again.

**edit** Just to add , ive done a complete scan with NOD32 , Microsoft AntiSpyware , Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad Aware SE.
Not one thing was found. =/

Antiuteo
Reply #351 Friday, December 23, 2005 1:57 PM
After updating from wb4.* public to wb5.0 public, wb no longer skins on startup (after I log in). I have to manually launch wbconfig and click the "Apply" button before it will skin. any ideas?

TheLain
Reply #352 Friday, December 23, 2005 5:25 PM
Wouldn't it be time to close this thread maybe? It was excessively talked about the original problem already, and this certainly shouldn't become a thread for all kinds of problems I guess.

Well, jsut my opinion. Merry christmas everyone!

Vanilla Ice
Reply #353 Friday, December 23, 2005 8:52 PM
hehe, i used to be able to download as much as i wanted, cause i complained whne they put in the d/l limit and one of the mods uncapped my account, but not no more. gee, i wonder why...

of course back then tho it wasn't a hard limit of 50 mb. you just had to wait a couple minutes til the server wasn't busy. i haven't d/led from here in a while so i dind't know about the lame new system.

Jafo
Reply #354 Friday, December 23, 2005 9:06 PM

i used to be able to download as much as i wanted, cause i complained whne they put in the d/l limit and one of the mods uncapped my account, but not no more. gee, i wonder why.

Oooh, I don't know....maybe it's because you are wanting to download skins for a program for which you have not paid.

That would be my 'guess'...


Gabe3
Reply #355 Saturday, December 24, 2005 12:57 AM
I'll be upgrading my system to a dfi nf4 ultra-d and a evga 7800 gt tuesday with a clean format of xp x64, I'll try out windows blinds 5 and see if I still get the message that asks me to restart when I try running it

CRasH180
Reply #356 Saturday, December 24, 2005 5:57 AM
CRasH180 ...if you have WB working well now....might I suggest AVG as an Antivirus alternative....it's definitely happy with WB....and the free ver is more than good enough [doesn't do nasty things like Norton did on mine]...


I used to use AVG Free, but I wanted something that would scan deeper into potential virus files. That was when I started searching for "Non-free" alternatives. I guess you are right. I need to uninstall Panda Antivirus and just go with AVG free. I think I will do that. Thank you Neil and Admin Jafo. Problem solved on my end. As far as I am concerned, you can lock this bloated thread whenever you are ready. Your group does a wonderful job on a absolutely great product!

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central

Jonep
Reply #357 Saturday, December 24, 2005 8:39 AM
Much respect to Neil and Jafo you guys have the patience of saints Merry Christmas guys

PS My windowblinds 5 has no probs wotsoever

Vanilla Ice
Reply #358 Sunday, December 25, 2005 12:37 AM
so the 50mb limit is for good? in which case this site isn't really free as claimed before. that's lame. it won't stop me from d/ling, but lame nonetheless. the people who create all of the skins don't charge for them, so i don't think wincustomize should either... and yes, i've contributed a few things which have had several thousand d/ls. i can understand having to pay bills, but i think this site is going about it wrong. you don't see other top-notch sites charging. of course most don't have the same selection of skins for stardock apps, but maybe if enough casual users flock away from wincustomize that they will soon.

i realize i'm kinda slamming wincustomize and stardock for everything, but i'm just saying what's on my mind. i have no bias towards you all. nothing persoanl. some of you seem like nice guys. i just hate the direction that the internet is taking as a whole of "premium" content. if the trend continues we'll have to pay to visit every site we like... that is, if you're the type to shell out cash for that sort of thing.

Jafo
Reply #359 Sunday, December 25, 2005 2:49 AM
Vanilla Ice ...SOMEONE has to pay for the bandwidth used to 'freely' host the skinners' works....and when you think fairly and logically about it that SOMEONE should be the downloader.  Since you do not appear to legally possess the programs [you mentioned a cracked WB] for which you wish to download skins it's even more 'unfair' to expect everyone else to pay YOUR way.   Certainly makes good sense to me....

MSethWeisberg
Reply #360 Sunday, December 25, 2005 3:14 AM
so the 50mb limit is for good? in which case this site isn't really free as claimed before. that's lame. it won't stop me from d/ling, but lame nonetheless. the people who create all of the skins don't charge for them, so i don't think wincustomize should either... and yes, i've contributed a few things which have had several thousand d/ls. i can understand having to pay bills, but i think this site is going about it wrong. you don't see other top-notch sites charging. of course most don't have the same selection of skins for stardock apps, but maybe if enough casual users flock away from wincustomize that they will soon.

i realize i'm kinda slamming wincustomize and stardock for everything, but i'm just saying what's on my mind. i have no bias towards you all. nothing persoanl. some of you seem like nice guys. i just hate the direction that the internet is taking as a whole of "premium" content. if the trend continues we'll have to pay to visit every site we like... that is, if you're the type to shell out cash for that sort of thing.


Actually another very popular site, deviantart does charge for a subscription and is by no means cheap. You want to keep this site free and have unlimited downloads then stop using cracked programs and support the site. Buy a program....namely WB. Submit a piece a of work. It was decided back after the October WC subscription drive that the site was going more preimium and be less accessable to those that didn't subscribe. Articles about it can be found here: https://www.wincustomize.com/Forums.aspx?ForumID=153&AID=89206#693465 , https://www.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?SID=1&AID=90167&c=1#699950 , https://www.wincustomize.com/Articles.aspx?AID=88041 ,

Digital content is the wave of the future....get on board or get off to the side. I truely believe that those artists have every right to make money from their work just as much as those that paint tradtionally.

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