Windows 7: Taskbar preview thumbnails gone after full screen game

I'm using Windows 7 Professional x64. After I play any full screen game (2d or 3d game), my thumbnails only have little icons instead of a complete picture. If I click on the icons the pictures are refreshed. Still annoying though.

When Working:


After a Game


Any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks all!

First thought is that DWN shut down and didn't restart.

Before and after you game, will you hit start and search for services.msc and check on that?

~Lordbob

I am getting the same problem. I believe I have tried to restart DWM.exe in attempt to "refresh" it but it did not fix the problem. Has anyone have an idea about why this happens? I have to admit I have not looked into this much and this post was the first thing I landed on. I will update this as soon as I find more information. This had always annoyed me, but I chose to ignore it. Now I find this particular annoyance happening more frequently now since I just recently purchased Battlefield Bad Company 2 three days ago (I'm already level 21). This was also an issue that existed in Vista, I was very irritated that this was not fixed in 7. Personally, I find this problem a big disappointment in 7 in my books, regardless of all the other things it does better at than any previous version.

DWM's buffer is purged when starting a full screen game. It either is purged and freeing up resources or it takes resources from the game. Which do you really want?

It's really great that it does that for you, but how about recreating the thumbnails after the full screen game is closed? Is that too much to ask?

Yes it is. Applications do not update there contents (unless programmed to do so) when minimized this again saves resources. There is nothing DWM can do because it does not control how or when an application repaints itself.

Actually you're wrong, it's not that hard to do. All they have to do is retain the thumbnails and there's an option to do that. Thanks for none of your help, I've fixed my own problem.

You are referring to the option in Computer Preferences, correct? It doesn't do what you think it does. However, it may function differently depending on if your graphics driver is WDDM 1.0 or 1.1. Version 1.1 removes the duplicate buffer from system memory and keeps it fully VRAM dedicated.