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Over the weekend, Windows 10 on my laptop updated itself to Creators Update. Ever since the update, window title bar text has been rendered onto a solid black rectangle a few pixels larger than the text itself.
When the window is active/has focus, the text is unreadable (theory: Windows is rendering it in the same black as the surrounding rectangle). When the window becomes inactive/loses focus, the text appears (I can't tell for sure because the fonts are too fine, but it looks like the text gets redrawn in white or light gray when the window passivates).
Confirmed to be affected:
Windows PowerShell
cmd.exe
Android Studio 2.3.3
IntelliJ 2017.2
Notepad++
SmartGit
Hex Editor NEO
A C#.net app I wrote a few years ago
Confirmed to NOT be affected:
Visual Studio 2015
Firefox & Thunderbird
Chrome
Office 365 apps (OneNote, Word, Excel, etc)
DVDFab
I'm pretty sure it's being caused by a change in Windows itself. Prior to this past weekend, my title bars rendered just fine.
Any idea how to fix it?
Bitbang3r
Posted 2017-08-28T19:26:21.460
Reputation: 248
If you roll back to 1607 does the behavior return to normal? – Ramhound – 2017-08-28T19:29:29.253
Not sure. I was able to fix the problem (for now, at least) by installing Glass8, which made the title bars behave normally and properly display text again. Interestingly enough, Glass8 seems to have no effect on the titlebars of apps that weren't broken by Creators Update. Based on what I know about Windows programming, it looks like Creators Update is specifically breaking the display behavior of title bar text for programs that use MFC. – Bitbang3r – 2017-08-28T22:54:46.893
Your C# application uses, MFC, a C++ library? PowerShell doesn't use MFC – Ramhound – 2017-08-28T22:57:07.530
Honestly, I don't know. I'm really a Java/Android programmer. I've written a few really ugly C# apps, but they're more like "syntactically-valid C# that's REALLY Java, brutally hacked and slashed until Visual Studio would compile it without blowing up" ;-) I just kind of took for granted that the C# window library (and Java Swing running on Windows, for that matter) was basically just a wrapper around native MFC code. In any case, there now seems to be a clear dividing line between "apps explicitly written for Metro/Modern/Win8+" and "everything else". – Bitbang3r – 2017-08-29T01:02:07.530
Neither Java or C# is a wrapper around MFC. MFC is a component of Visual C++ – Ramhound – 2017-08-29T01:12:41.587