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Wictor Wilén

Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) - SharePoint 2010 | Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - SharePoint Server MVP | Author

Annoying Windows Vista bugs - re-booting is necessary

Posted at 2007-04-26 09:06 by Wictor Wilén in Windows XP , Windows Vista with 4 comments.

I have been running Windows Vista for a few months now and I discover new bugs (and features) every other day. Vista does not seem so stable as it should be. It's no big blue screens or major application crashes but small annoying stuff like not persisting settings and stuff like that.

I earlier wrote about changing the start menu power button, this changed setting reverts to it's original state about every third boot and then goes back to my changed state on the next boot! I have also written about that icons disappear from the notification area once in a while.

Another issue that has been hazzling me is that on my development/work machine I have several applications running (Microsoft Offce, Virtual PC, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio) at the same time and at the end of the day I can't get the applications to work properly. Context menus does not appear when they should, buttons is missing in dialogs, windows is not appearing etc.

Here is an example when I tried to close a Notepad document. First an empty dialog came up with no options...

So I closed down a Skype window...

Not much better, but now I could see what the dialog was about, so I closed Excel...

That was better!

I never had this problem with Windows XP and it looks like Windows Vista does not handle resources correctly or leaks them. Have you experienced something similar or do you now if there is a solution available?

Windows Vista is designed to go into standby mode instead of rebooting, just look at the new start menu, more often than previous Windows versions. But the experience so far is that one reboot every day is necessary to get it to work properly. My XP workstation was sometimes not rebooted for a few days because I did not need to. I really hope that the Vista team is listening (yes, I have opened a few support cases but since it's random the most common answers is - sorry can't help you) and that they are working as much as they did in the end of last year before the release to create a great Service Pack 1.

Comments and trackbacks

#  Perhaps you're running out of handles? by John Ericson
Screenshot from websnpr I've experienced something similar on my XP MCE 2005 computer. It occurs when I have lots of applications running. When it happens I can't start new applications and the existing ones may act weird. My way of solving the problem is to close some applications. I believe this is happening because I run out of handles. You can monitor how many handles you're currently using by starting Task manager and going to the Performance tab (this is for XP but I assume it works much the same in Vista). You can also add a handles column in the Processes view for more information, GDI Objects might be related too so you might want to keep an eye on them as well. When I run into this problem I have about 23000 handles allocated. I hope this helps and feel free to share if you come up with something more on the issue.
#  Re: Perhaps you're running out of handles? by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr Hello John, yes I have experienced this on XP once in a while when some programs leaked handles. What annoys me is that either Vista consumes more MUCH more handles than XP or it actually leaks them. I guess that the new Vista stylish applications (like Office 2007 and Aero) use much more handles than previous versions. Perhaps I'll get back to this in another post...
#  Same thing here... by Carlos
Screenshot from websnpr I have been running Windows Vista Ultimate for the last two months on 4 gb of memory. I experience your same symptoms and instability. I must reboot the system sometimes twice per day in order to get apps to work correctly. What I regret is that everything worked perfectly under Windows XP SP2. It is very annoying when your home webcam suddenly stops transmitting video and you are at the office...
#  Re: Same thing here by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr Hello Carlos, this is not uncommon for MS (and not limited to MS) applications - you need at least SP1 to get it working alright. The latest reliability patches (see other post on this) seems to have fixed some things, but I expect/demand more to happen in SP1.
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