Windows 7 and problems with DWM

Sometimes there are some problems with DWM – for example I use GoToMeeting from Citrix for conference calls, however when you are organizer, your desktop will automatically switch to Aero Basic mode – and once you are finished with confcall, it will switch back to full Aero interface.

Many windows however won’t recover. You can see below screenshot of my desktop:

As you can see, only Skype window is restored, rest of windows are all black. Also notice how taskbar looks like – shining start button, however that’s it :)

It’s very easy to recover once you know that DWN is responsible. Just kill DWM.exe process, it will automatically re-launch and all windows are recovered:

I already saw this few times and it can be quite handy to know what’s wrong. Also I experienced few times that some applications had black box instead of text (will try to get screenshot next time) – DWM restart helped also ;)