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On Windows 7 Professional N 64bit, the visual effect option "Enable desktop composition" does not work correctly for me.

Both the DWM and Themes services are running.

When I tick it and click "apply" or "ok", nothing will happen, and when I close and reopen the Performance Options window, the box is unticked again.

The only way I can get it to work is by using the "Adjust for best appearence" preset, which ticks all boxes and does in fact enable desktop composition.
As soon as I untick any other item, the preset jumps back to "Custom", and upon closing / reopening the Performance Options window, desktop composition is disabled again.

I set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\Composition to 1 and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\CompositionPolicy to 2.

After a reboot, CompositionPolicy was reset back to 0, Composition was still at 1.

I'm at a loss because there's no error message / log entry that I can find.

Nils Landt
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2 Answers2

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It's caused by a running program on your pc, I used to have the exact same problem for years caused by my USB stick modem program, and I used to fix it just by closing the program even without checking any boxes in "Visual Effects".

To solve this if you don't know which program causes this, just go to the Task Manager >> Processes then sort the processes by User Name then check all the processes running under your current user, kill any process that isn't usual windows process one by one (it can be caused by any program even those come with some devices drivers) and check the composition by moving any window after killing each process until you get to the one causing this.

If you found it and it's probably a startup process since it causes this each time you restart the windows, you can stop it from loading on startup by typing in start search msconfig then enter, go to Startup >> find the process and uncheck it.

M.Allam
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I recently pulled my hair on this too. Good news, there is a solution, and guess what, it's one of the less obvious I ever met on Windows:

  • right-click on desktop > "Personalize".
  • caution: the next step will discard your current theme (wallpaper, colors, etc.)
  • Apply one of the "Aero Themes".
  • You have desktop composition back. Enjoy the optional transparency and the much higher performance.

I suppose the issue is because at some point you switched to "Basic Themes", and Windows is not smart enough to switch back to "Aero Themes".

Gras Double
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