Please Read this if your UI is black and painting slowly
Saturday, December 17, 2005 by Neil Banfield | Discussion: WindowBlinds
If you have installed a pirate copy (AKA cracked) version of WindowBlinds 5, please be aware that the crack is faulty and WindowBlinds will cease to function correctly on your computer.
To fix this you just need to uninstall WB and if you wish install a purchased copy of WB, or the trial.
To uninstall, you can either wait for your computer to login, unload WB (either using wbconfig, display properties, or from a command prompt calling WBLOAD UNLOAD) and then uninstall WB. Or you can boot into safe mode & uninstall WB from there.
Your computer has not been harmed in anyway. Whoever made the crack did a poor job and patched out code that causes WindowBlinds to no longer be able to paint bitmaps (so title bars, borders, everything will be black).
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Reply #102 Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:48 PM
System info:
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.
(Default Monitor) 1 is attached to NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
Wblind.dll 2005/11/28 13:57:10
Wbsrv.dll 2005/11/28 15:52:00
Wbconfig.exe 2005/11/28 16:19:00
Wbload.exe 2005/11/25 19:30:58
Wbhelp.dll 2004/09/18 15:37:00
Wbui.dll 2005/11/20 12:23:40
Tray.dll 2005/11/02 13:28:26
Thanks,
Anthony
Reply #103 Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:51 PM
Reply #104 Thursday, January 19, 2006 1:51 PM
Edit:worked for 20 minutes then crapped out on me. It affects explorer first, then to the rest of my apps. Any other solutions? I have 1gb of ram, amd 64 3000+, so it should run nice. Any help is welcome.
Reply #105 Thursday, January 19, 2006 8:29 PM
What problems are you having?
Screenshots will help.
Reply #107 Friday, January 20, 2006 8:29 AM
I'm guessing that it's because WB 5 is more integrated into the OS and adjustments are being made at bootup to accomodate the changes, etc???
Reply #108 Friday, January 20, 2006 11:49 AM
anthony
Reply #109 Saturday, January 28, 2006 9:35 PM
Reply #110 Monday, January 30, 2006 4:58 AM
It will never be impossible for someone to break it, but the more sophisticated the solution will ensure a smaller pool of potential crackers are capabale of breaking through it.
There are more then enough individuals and companies around that are able to provide the technology or experience stardock needs to ensure they stay on top of their core products rather then ancillery necessity.
So basically with crackers I am not really of an opinion on them as i don't know any. People who use cracks, a bit of a differant story. Unfortunately it can be a little difficult to quantify their effect at times as the actual conversion from a trial to a registered user is affected by a lot more then simply cracks.
But still increasing subscriptions by 20% after preventing cracking for a substantial amount of time would be a boon for any company.
And to the people who used a bad crack and came here for support, you guys will take anything for free wont you.
Reply #111 Monday, January 30, 2006 7:39 PM
When I went from .009 to .010 it worked fine for a week or so then went white. I went back to .009 it worked fine , I went to .011 same thing happened so I went back to .010 and so far no problem, go figure...
Reply #112 Thursday, February 2, 2006 11:43 PM
Reply #113 Friday, February 3, 2006 7:00 AM
Reply #114 Friday, February 3, 2006 12:24 PM
Reply #115 Tuesday, February 14, 2006 1:54 PM
OK i have a problem of WB not working in XP64. it works fine when i boot to xphome.
kinda strange i got it to work buy clicking on the only ico i could see my computer.
then it would draw the rest of icons and the task bar would be missing some of my start up items even WB was missing from the tray.
but its screweing up my sys things like system restore, defrag, even my add/remove in control panel was missing and a few other parts of xp are messed up.
but i boot in to safe mode and remove WB and everything is working again?
and befor you say anything yep i tryed the free ver, the hacked ver and the retail ver last.
i can get the old ver to install and works fine but ver 5 is broken in xp64 lol after all this i see that you can remove WB from the Star dock center. any ideas i relay would like it working in xp64?
opet 170 amd and microsoft 2x patch/hot fix
evga 7800 gt driver 81.98
2 gig A-data ddr 3200
biostar Tforce4 sli
Reply #116 Tuesday, February 14, 2006 6:33 PM
| and befor you say anything yep i tryed the free ver, the hacked ver and the retail ver last. |
I'd say that is very likely your problem....vestages of the 'prior installs' are probably messing with your current situation/install....and my money would be on the 'hacked ver' as you call it.
When people 'hack' a program, the user, for some quaint obscure reason seems to have faith that the 'hacker' actually knows what they are doing.
Mostly they do not.
Hacking, by its very nature is fraught with danger....and doing so to a program that integrates so closely with the OS/GUI is simply asking for trouble.
It is not overkill to suggest you do a full reformat....and install that 'retail ver' ONLY, as you would then be running a legitimate system devoid of extraneous 'hacker' issues.
Reply #117 Tuesday, February 14, 2006 8:30 PM
hm this is a new install around 2 week old i rarely use this os XP64 i just wanted to test out WB in it.
i might try a repair install but as for formating and reinstalling.
i think i see where the problem is in xp64 you have Program Files (x86) and Program Files folders and the @#$%*&# cracked ver installed in both some how so it left parts in it. it was my fault i tryed running the ver 4 and the cracked one in 32bit compatability mode when installing.
ill take a look at the regestery later on but i think i can get it working buy striping out the leftover junk in Program Files (x86) and Program Files
thanx for getting me thinking. i had to reinstall the cracked ver and watch where it installed to to see the problem
Reply #118 Tuesday, February 14, 2006 8:42 PM
| i had to reinstall the cracked ver and watch where it installed to to see the problem |
the 'cracked' ver will likely break system dll's causing the OS to fail. Until you permanently and totally eradicate ALL traces of the 'crack' you can look forward to enjoying system failures.
Essentially you get what you pay for.
Pay nothing....and you get nothing-but-grief.
You also will not get much in the way of sympathy OR support, not from a site which is funded by the Company whose product was 'cracked'.
If you have purchased the full Windowblinds proggy then the only logical solution is to install that ONLY.
...and in the meantime send off a note of thanks to the hacker who screwed your computer. I'm sure he will be chuffed.
Reply #119 Tuesday, February 14, 2006 9:03 PM
hold on now i was not looking for sympathy i was looking for some ideas on how to make it work.
im so used to haveing to patch a game or app to make it work i try almost anything even cracks
i pay for my apps and games i tryed the cracked version out of desperation trying to get it to work in xp64 i had the payed for ver working and still working on the same sys just under a diferetn OS. my problem was with the old freeware install when i went with ver 5 that came with the package.
granted installing the cracked ver made things worse. but i had a problem to start with.
the new skins would load but when i rebooted it lost the icons desktop was showing the wallpaper and a few icons but not all, not the problems others were haveing with blank desktop or realy slow loading. mine was missing things.
Reply #120 Tuesday, February 14, 2006 9:21 PM
i still find it strange that WB only efects the following program. everything else works and when i uninstall WB they all work.
windows messenger
hyper terminal
remote conections
sound recorder
volume control
backup
system restore
disk deframeter
when i get the time ill restor the ghosted image of the drive and see if its still broken and if so its a bad install of xp64 from the start.
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Reply #101 Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:31 PM
If you don't want to share your creativity, then just use it on your own computer. Nobody is forcing you to share, and yet, so many people are more than happy to do so.