Windowblinds & Opus v9/v10

How would you suggest we fix it?

I'm not blowing you off; I'm telling you to take the problem to the people who can fix it: The Windowblinds team and/or the people who made the themes (depending on which issue we're talking about).

And Windowsblinds / those themes are the ONLY apps / themes that demonstrate these oddities, too. (Depending on which issue we're talking about.)

FWIW, with your toolbar/menu issue, you could probably work around it by assigning a background image so that it overrides the image coming from the theme. If you make the image a solid color it'll look like that pink bar at the top isn't there.

That's one way to fix it if you don't think the people responsible for the theme will respond to support requests. (Which isn't our fault and isn't something we can do anything about. :slight_smile:)

Thanks for the tip leo, but using an image doesn't help. I think it has something to do with the way Opus draws the top window border when it goes fullscreen. As I said earlier, if Opus is not maximized, the topmost toolbar displays fine.

The reason I press the issue is because I simply cannot believe that the issue lies solely with Stardock and with the author of the skin I'm using - especially since the issue is present with several skins. Opus clearly does something differently than the way all other Windows apps do, and that difference is causing a compatibility problem...

I'll try bringing up the issue with Stardock and see where it gets me. I have a funny feeling they'll tell me to take it up with GPSoftware...

So you still get a pink line at the top of the toolbar even when it's configured to use a background image? That shouldn't be possible, unless something really screwy is going on*.

Make sure the toolbar itself is configured to use the image you set. (If you changed Standard Toolbar Image within Preferences / Display / Images, the toolbar may still be set to use some other image under Settings -> Customize -> Toolbars.)

*Which may well be the case, given the weird stuff Windowblinds is doing to Opus with regard to titlebars, buttons and glass borders. Perhaps Windowblinds isn't accounting for the fact that titlebars are shorter when windows are maximized, in some way that only affects whatever strange mode it's decided to use for Opus where it doesn't theme its buttons and messes up the File Open dialogs?

I'm certain that the toolbar is configured to use the image. This what it looks like maximized (The odd pink bit in the first image, above "File" and "Edit", is actually Opera's menu button shining through)


And this is what it looks like when Opus is windowed. Notice how the problem disappears.


The issue does seem to be more with the way the titlebar is drawn, but since all other apps on my system draw the fullscreen titlebar just fine, I'm at a loss to explain this...

I have posted about this on the Stardock support forum as well. So far, the only reply I got is that Opus does things funny, and that I either have to turn off skinning for the app, or get used to quirks like this :cry:

If the toolbar was set to use a shared image, try setting it to tile:


It is set to tile in the screenshots above...

I just installed Windowblinds...

Here is conclusive proof of what I've been saying all along. The bugs are in Windowblinds, and Windowblinds is treating Opus differently to other applications.

If you rename any other program to dopus.exe, the File Open problem (and lack of themed buttons) can be seen in that. Here is a screenshot where I tried it using my simple FileTypeDiag.exe (which shares no code with Opus and is just a simple MFC app with a button that shows a File Open window). As you can see, the version called FileTypeDiag.exe is fine, but the version renamed to dopus.exe is screwed up.

Similarly, if you copy dopus.exe to test.exe and launch that (NOT recommended in general, it WILL break some stuff if in Opus if you do that, but it's fine for a quick test; be sure to exit Opus and delete the extra test.exe after you've done a quick test) then the File Open dialog is fine in Opus itself.


And, sure enough, if you search the Windowblinds binaries you'll find they have hardcoded checks for dopus.exe inside wblind.dll and wblind64.dll:


So it's Windowblinds. End of story.

Nice sleuthing, leo. I'll take this up with Stardock. I'm not convinced that this is the same issue as the titlebar problem though, I think Opus just freaks out when the titlebar graphic is smaller than the standard Aero image. But we shall see...

Maybe you can keep this thread open so I can report back what I hear from Stardock?

I couldn't repro the titlebar thing with the 5 or so stock themes I tried, fwiw, but I suspect it's all related.

Doubtful, as a) Opus 10 never paints its own titlebars or has very little concept of how big they are or where they are, other than what the OS tell sit; b) If you reduce the titlebar size using standard Windows font settings then things are just fine; c) The titlebar size varies with Windows versions yet the problem only happens with Windowblinds.

But, hey, if you want to continue assuming it's Opus at fault and not Windowblinds, despite the mounting evidence then I give up...

And, hopefully, so people can apologise for wasting so much of our time, repeatedly holding us to account for Stardock's problems, and having a go at us simply because we respond to support issues while Stardock ignore them. :slight_smile:

Very nice work leo!

Sorry leo if you feel I've been unfairly stubborn. I'm not trying to cause problems, I'm just trying to understand what's going on.

Stardock admits to messing with dopus.exe but they don't seem to have a good reason for it. They keep going on about "explorer replacement", but that has nothing to do with the issues at hand.

Regarding the toolbar glitch, if I tell WindowBlinds not to skin titlebars for dopus.exe then the toolbar displays just fine! Unfortunately that causes more problems, and is not a good solution...

Some might think me a dopus "fanboy" and such.... but seriously, as soon as I saw the affect Leo's renaming of ANY exe has to dopus.exe had on a previously properly working dialog... well, I think it's pretty incontrovertible proof that Stardock are the only ones who should be held accountable for spending any more time on trying to figure out why something is going wrong with how Opus is being displayed when being used with Windowblinds. If it were just a generic "compatibility" thing I'd leave the door open for Opus folks to still look into an issue... but when WB is clearly targeting the dopus process name and doing something different, all bets are off and it's Stardock who need to do more than provide non-specific "explorer replacement" nonsense...

@newguy: if you've got Stardocks ear - rather than continue to field such responses, I wonder what their answer would be to the question of "hey Stardock, what exactly are you concerned would not work right if you entirely stopped screening for the dopus.exe process?". For instance, what specific problem do they think they're solving by messing with the standard open dialog if it's dopus.exe calling it...?

Here is an experimental Opus build which patches Windowblinds in-memory to make it treat Opus like any other app.

This is not intended as a long-term solution. It's so you can test what things would be like if Windowblinds was changed so that it does not detect Opus. In particular, it'd be interesting to know if this fixes NewGuy's toolbar/maximized problem.

This will only work with Opus 10.0.0.6 (beta). It won't work with older versions, nor with future versions.

[ul][li]Download:

http://leo.dopus.com/temp/dopus_10006_experimental_windowblinds_patcher.7z

[/li]
[li]Screenshots: (click for full-size)

Patch enabled:


Patch disabled again:
[/li][/ul]




Here's a copy of the readme inside the archive:

[ul][li]Purpose:

This is an experimental build of Directory Opus 10.0.0.6 (beta).

It detects Windowblinds and patches it in-memory to make it treat Opus like any other program, which prevents WB causing problems with the Opus UI. The patching only affects the Opus process and will not modify behavior in any other program.

We may or may not make this part of the normal Opus releases; that is undecided. For now, we wanted to put this out so that people can try it and test/confirm that things work fine when Windowblinds isn't applying special rules to Opus.

Let me stress, again, that the problems are caused by Windowblinds and we are merely providing a workaround. We hope that Stardock will change Windowblinds so that this is not neccessary but, while we wait for that to happen, people can try this build to see how it works for them.

[/li]
[li]Requirements:

The dopus.exe replacements in this archive should only be installed on top of 10.0.0.6 (beta). Trying to use them with earlier or future versions will not work.

Links to 10.0.0.6 (beta) can be found here (until it is surpassed by a newer version).

[/li]
[li]Background:

Windowblinds explicitly targets dopus.exe and causes problems with parts of the UI which do not happen if Windowblinds treats Opus like any other program. You can prove this by renaming another program to dopus.exe and causing it to display a File Open dialog on a Windows 7 machine; when using certain themes the top of the dialog will be messed up; rename the app to something else and it will look fine again. Most themed button painting is also disabled in anything named dopus.exe, even though most of the themes seem to work and look fine with Opus. (Not all of them look perfect in all parts of Opus, but that doesn't seem unique to Opus from what I saw in other tools while developing and testing this build, so that doesn't seem like a reason to treat Opus specially, and especially not with the results that the current treatment is having. If people report issues with particular themes and we are able to fix them then we will do our best; presently, Opus has mainly been tested using the standard Windows XP/Vista/7 themes as those are all we have had access to.)

Let me also say that, contrary to some reports, Opus is not and never has been a shell replacement. Opus is an Explorer replacement, in that it associates itself with double-clicks on folders like an image viewer would associate itself with double-clicks on JPEGs. Opus is not a shell replacement like LiteStep. Opus does not replace the Windows Desktop, Taskbar, File Open dialogs, etc. Those are all still handled by the standard Windows shell, unaltered, and you can still manually run Explorer.exe to access Windows Explorer. (You can also turn off Explorer Replacement entirely, of course.)[/li][/ul]