Windows 7 - Window outline or black screen flicker in old games

Hello,

This has been bugging me ever since I got windows 7, basically it seems any older games running on 16bit color seems to have a strange flickering every 10-20 seconds for example, blood 2 the chosen (only 16bit color available in this), in fullscreen you can see a border of a window filled with black every so often.

I could try and put a video up for this if my explanation does not make sense but if anyone knows why this happens, is there a way to fix it?

I've already tried ALL the compatability options etc, even mucked about with nvidia control panel to force vsync on and off.

I used to have the problem with another game but changing it to 32bit fixed it... so it seems to be just a 16bit color problem.

thanks for any help

right click the game .exe file. This would be labeled as an application in the game directory NOT THE SHORTCUT, in the compatibility tab
Check every thing, except the run in 640x480 resolution and run in 256 color.

And make sure the drop down is set to windows xp sp3.
click apply click okay, then try running the game.

Thanks for the reply, I tried that but its still showing the window border every few seconds

Are there any scaling features in the nvidia control panel?
It sounds like some sort of scaling issue.

Nothing mentioning scaling atall, mostly texture filtering, antialiasing options.

Programmatically change Nvidia scaling - NVIDIA Developer Forums

my guess is the older games simply don't support it.

Ok I think I just figured it out (fingers crossed) I had AI Suite II installed, its an asus motherboard configurator, I just shut down all its multiple processes and tried various problematic games and it seems to have fixed it, I've just uninstalled AI Suite II now and restarted and it seems to have worked. Never used the stupid thing anyway only used it to check temperatures (speedfan is better for that anyway).

Thanks for your replies Maguscreed

Yeah AI suite also installs a system driver that's a major known cause of bsod's in win 7
So you probably saved yourself some future troubles as well.