I really think the exchange of incompatibilities serves both sides. But I also think this should have been kept on an internal level, as what I really hate is all the people spreading FUD about WindowBlinds again. I can't imagine any PC of mine without it since more than 10 years.

This quote from Stardock's CEO seems appropriate here:

In the case of Stardock, it means that the company reflects my values. In particular, transparency and collaboration with others.  

Transparency is a double-edged sword. We won't tell people what they want to hear. We simply tell them what we believe is the truth -- even if that is not necessarily good news for us.

I agree. I would rather be open and transparent about what the issues are, what has been done about them and what still needs to be done.

The page I posted in my previous reply is not just a list of problems in WindowBlinds. It includes things which are/were purely bugs on the Opus side, and I've been open about those issues and not tried to hide them or pass the blame. I've also made it explicit, at the top of the page, that it is all from my point of view and only my take on what has happened and what I think should happen.

I have invited people (with hex-edited WB DLLs, obviously) to report any other issues that they find between Opus and WB, using the list to check if they are already known (and as a hint for the type of things to look for). There are bound to be more issues lurking around, and the sooner they are reported the sooner they can be sorted out.

The list has not been posted in flashing lights. I just added it to the existing threads here & at the Opus forum, and added a single-line link to it in the earlier blog post. People interested in the ongoing issues and the work to fix them will now be better informed and know what to expect when we release Opus 10.0.3.1 later this week.

I also want people to see that, on the Opus side, we are still putting time into identifying, understanding and addressing these problems, regardless of whose fault they are, even while WB is still breaking Opus in ways which make that extra work fairly irrelevant. (Most people won't be able to see the fixes/workarounds I worked on if WB is still disabling themes in Opus, and all the cosmetic stuff is utter trivia while WB is still making it impossible for Opus to open standard file dialogs. To my knowledge, we still don't have an ETA on when that will be fixed.)

People can see that we are not just complaining about things and expecting someone else to fix them. We are putting significant effort in to get things solved, where they can be solved or worked-around on our side, and regardless of whose fault they are, with the aim that Opus and WindowBlinds will work great together.

What FUD? As I've said all along, if I have posted anything that is factually incorrect then I will gladly correct it. There are enough real issues here that I don't need to start making things up or trying to paint a false picture of anything.

(EDIT: Maybe you meant other people's comments, not mine. If so, apologies for taking things the wrong way, but I'd just say that those comments existed already whether or not the list of issues was public/transparent.)

Equally, I've made some pretty strong statements, so I feel the need to back them up with evidence. To the best of my knowledge and understanding, none of the evidence is untrue and all of it reflects reality. All of my statements are what I genuinely feel about the situation. People can decide for themselves if my statements are correct. Providing the evidence that led to my conclusions can only help people evaluate what I have said. If my evidence does not fit my conclusions then my conclusions will fall, as they should. Where something is subjective, we may disagree, but I still want to make what I'm saying and why I'm saying it perfectly clear so that it can be judged fairly.

I was also rather alarmed that Neil said he planned to have WindowBlinds continue to detect Opus and treat it specially, given that doing that is what has caused the biggest problems here, and given that it seems completely unnecessary for things which we can and will change on the Opus side. The Opus 10.0.3.1 release later this week will prove that. We are strongly against WB detecting Opus because we really want to avoid these problems happening again, and we believe any issues in the code should be fixed where they are, rather than each of us trying to modify the other's code.

If the list of issues makes anything look bad then the solution is to fix the issues, not hide them from people.

It would not be right to hide those details. Users should not be kept in the dark about problems and it is simply not fair to expect Opus to continue absorbing the hit to its reputation while shielding the thing that is fundamentally responsible. WindowBlinds has been making Opus look bad for years and broken for months, for reasons which could have been avoided a long time ago had proper care been paid to WB's development, QA, regression-testing and communication (both to users and to developers of the apps which WB affects).

Opus *is* being made to look bad, and has been for quite some time. Please don't ask me to hide reality because you want to make WB look good no matter what.

Leo, I didn't mean to offend YOU with my post. It is some peole in Your forums. And let's see the facts : WindowBlinds has to deal literally with thousands of programs and hindreds of different configurations. Given that fact we are speaking of 0,1 percent or something it may have issues with.

I also have SyncBack registered which warns me that WindowBlinds is installed and may cause problems. Only thing is, I don't have any problems using it on a daily base.

Please, I didn't intend to 'hide' anything, just t keep it fair. People claiming they don't understand how anyone could ever run WindowBlinds on his/her machine still just have no clue.

c242: Regarding SyncBack it seems there is blame both sides.

They are passing in incorrect set of flags to the DrawThemeTextEx api which is causing their text on their toolbar buttons to be misaligned.

There is a menu issue too which is now resolved on our end, but they continue to have a menu issue with selected menu items due to them painting the parts in the wrong order.  This isn't totally obvious with Aero as it has pretty high transparency in that image, but becomes so obvious with some WB skins.

I will be contacting them about those issues so they can fix them as I can well see the menu issue causing them pain on Windows 8 if it comes with a Metro skin.

Today, after noticing the problems with WB and Opus via the Opus update panel news, I have read through this whole topic and related ones. Opus is essential, WB is visual candy. I like them both and hate the standard Win7 theme. I like the simplicity of the Sabertooth theme, not because it's Mac like, but because it's uncluttered and clear. I don't have any particular visual effects added to Opus. I have had Opus for years and years, WB since getting Win7, I also installed Object Dock Plus v2 which adds a nice visual dock system.

Opus is always regularly updated and keeps on top of things with a wealth of information and details available at any time with lots of constructive help from people like Leo, always there to help and get things sorted. From what I've noticed about WB and OD, things aren't addressed fully in forums, updates are infrequent and don't seem to address the issues that repeatedly come up. I for one get the small icons problem in Object Dock that I couldn't find a solution for in the forums despite it being mentioned for several years and I have noticed lots of WB incompatibility issues with some quite important programs that I have had to exclude from WB's visual ill-effects.

I hadn't fully appreciated all the issues Leo has raised in the videos and notes, some I had come across myself, e.g. wondering why when I upgraded Opus that the Load button didn't work in Licence Manager and I'm seriously wondering what other random things I miss out on not just in Opus, but all programs. I'm no serious power user or expert in this field but I would have expected WB to be a bit more sorted out in terms of its efficiency and accuracy. The slow update cycle seems to be a major issue and I have been disappointed that updates are rarely available when I look at Stardock. There's also all that weird Impulse updater thing to contend with that seems to be on my system which as a non-gamer is just a pain and irrelevant. I have since realised this now is old or outdated and the last update I found to a Stardock program was after prolonged failed attempts via Impulse but then found elsewhere. This is the one of the problems with Stardock etc., not well documented and poor updating and irrelevant out of date information.

Reading all of the notes above and the related posts, it seems Stardock have still not quite yet understood what Leo has been trying to point out; WB should not be excluding Opus and if any issues are found that WB doesn't agree with, they will fix it almost immediately which by its nature precludes the need to be put on the exclusion list for 'special treatment'. A program such as WB that is only updated at what only seems to be as result of errors pointed out months after the issue was raised, really should not be trying to defend its position against another program that would identify, solve and update the issue with its users sometimes within a few days. QED, this whole issue and what can only be described as a defensive stance by WB developers. The points have been made and are justified, WB is doing some weird things and really should be on top of things a bit more with regular updates and fixes. Leaving Opus on some blacklist for years because of some incompatibility years ago really shouldn't be happening in a modern software development environment. WB undoubtedly does some clever stuff where Microsoft fails but as I say, it needs to be kept on top of which in some ways must be really difficult when dealing with various software developers and there odd workarounds, bodges and 'features' (Microsoft not excluded).

What perhaps surprises me with WB is that there isn't a user webpage or database of problem programs within WB and user-configurable suggested settings to use. If other program developers found themselves on this list then maybe some issues and disagreements might get sorted out quicker and perhaps in a more cooperative way. To embed undocumented 'fixes' into WB seems counter-productive and given the long update cycle it's no wonder stuff gets forgotten and errors reoccur.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming updates from both parties and hope that WB will continue to receive regular updates while its issues are sorted out.

If you have had to exclude applications please let us know so we can investigate it.

Looking at my list of "Per application" exclusions, I have the following set to be excluded from WBs effects. I can't recall the exact reasons why each would have ended up on my list, suffice it to say it was probably a serious visual or functional elements problem that went away when excluded:

Artisteer.exe

Diskeeper.exe

iexplore.exe

thunderbird.exe (uses a different skin)

TrueImageLauncher.exe

TrueImageTools.exe

UltraRecall.exe

None of the visual settings/themes for the above software is altered from the general defaults beforehand. All my software is generally kept at the current/latest version on Win7 64bit.

With the Acronis TrueImage software I recall the problem was quite serious with missing panels and critical information missing. I seem to recall also some issues with WesternDigital MyBook software, I might be wrong with this one but there may again have been some missing or scrambled information. I don't currently have that installed to test again.

Aside from the above, the Opus issues described do exist on my system and having read through all the issues today, many of the unexplained visual and functional problems I've had with other programs over the last 9 months since purchasing WB have been ringing bells and could well be explained by WB's inbuilt exclusions of undocumented alterations and issues?  I use almost exclusively Adobe and Design/Creativity software and while I can't pinpoint any other particular issues with those at the moment, I do wonder if any of these programs might be on WB's current internal hit list of exclusions and if any of the odd problems I've had with those relate to WB's decisions and issues?  

I really need to know why you excluded IE as excluding that would seem to be crazy.  We test against IE extensively!

The only issues I know with IE are theme related and a bug in their code which does not handle theme changes well sometimes.  In that case you can get black scrollbars and blank controls BUT only if you just changed a theme and only sometimes and it would go away after you close IE or reboot.  This can be reproduced without WB too if you switch themes around.

The theme related issues are some scrollbars may show things stretching instead of tiled, but thats a actually a bug/limitation in IE itself.

TrueImage had an issue a while back but this was resolved in the 7.3 release.

To need to exclude all those points to something more than just WindowBlinds.

Support tells me they have not heard from you and I would urge you to contact them so they can assist.

Regarding thunderbird, there was an issue for a short period due to thunderbird switching to using your 3D graphics card to render all your mail.  This caused issues with WB until we set it to be detected as firefox (which it is basically)

Thunderbird does have a number of issues such as attaching a file can make the input cursor vanish in a mail, but these happen with or without WB.

I really can't remember now why IE is in the list, but maybe it was the black scroll bars you mention? I don't normally play with standard themes anyway so wouldn't know the difference. I have most of the stupid Win 7 transparency Aero stuff turned off anyway. 

I have V2012 build 5545 currently installed, I have no idea if I have updated it since excluding it which if I did must have been after purchasing WB in approx April 2011.

How do I know what a normal list should look like and whether my list of a few programs is excessive? I assure you I only included programs on the exclusion list because there was a rendering or functional issue of certain elements, i.e. At the time of exclusion, they showed errors which then worked fine without WB activated.

I have just deleted all the programs references I had listed in the exclusions list. I note that for Thunderbird I had unchecked everything so in theory it wasn't doing anything but the description still said "Uses a different skin". At a first quick glance of all the mentioned programs running again without a WB exclusion, I can't spot any issues right now. Maybe this is because of updates/upgrades to the programs or maybe the update for WB itself in November (I think?). 

But surely herein lies the problem, one moment there's a problem with a program, then it gets an update and is somehow fixed in relation to WB, or WB 'fixes' it internally, but users still have it manually added in their configuration as not compatible and perhaps altered in some way to make it function better. I have not seen any WB documentation about excluded or problematic programs past or present, and it seems that WB does not check or inform of possible 'fixes' to old problems. What I mean is, WB should perhaps actively and regularly check a user's configuration and program versions installed and make suggestions accordingly, revising its advice or suggestions when a program update is available or installed, or WB itself fixes or updates an issue. An automatic weekly or monthly WB database update of programs could solve lots of headaches for everyone and would keep users informed of possible improvements they could make as well as helping us understand what is going on with certain programs and WB itself.

I guess it's a difficult issue for WB's developers, if they spot errors by another programmer, then is it their duty to spend time sorting it out whether it's by a workaround or by contacting the developer? If the database of possible problems were open to all, then perhaps we could all take an active role in sorting out the issues whether by manual WB configuration and exclusion or by nagging the original developers of that other problematic program. To keep that data and information somehow hidden and no one is any the wiser can only lead to problems further down the line.

As alluded to by Leo and others, and as 'visual themes' are WB's whole reason for being, it really should be WB's role to seek the causes of problems and support the fixing of them rather than make hidden workarounds. Like in medicine; treat the cause, not the symptoms and side-effects.  

If I find anything from now on I may well do that. However, without a database of good/bad programs, there's no easy way to find out what is currently known or maybe just me not getting something right. 

Thanks for your time.

As a general rule ANY exclusions should be reported to us as while 100% compatibility is totally impossible (everything has bugs and limitations), we would like to manage as high as possible and it is quite possible an issue in one app impacts more than one app.

Regarding how we handle issues, there are very good reasons why an app should be handled specifically.  Some apps require additional dlls to be loaded into memory and having those load into every process just in case would be terribly wasteful.