Windows 7: Aero Disables itself randomly on windows 7?

Im not sure if its a major cause for concern... But I have noticed that Aero will disable itself very randomly.... like weeks apart randomly. After about 10 minutes or so Aero will re-enable itself. The only connection I have came up with is that firefox "with a youtube playing" is running when it happens.

The first time it happened, it was quite alarming... enough so to make me do several full malware scans on all 3 of my hard drives. However none of the virus scanners detected a infection... and they still have not to this day... so I have came to the conclusion that it must be a program that just runs randomly that has the "no aero" launch command.

My only problem is that I have not found any "new" programs running during the period that aero is disabled. Just wondering if someone else has figured out what exactly is causing this.

Windows 7 will revert to the standard theme anytime you run an application that is not compatible with the Display Window Manager (DWM) which provides the Aero features, your video card or video RAM runs out of memory to fully load all the Aero features or your system performance drops below an acceptable level to provide all Aero features. When this happens, a balloon popup should appear near your taskbar clock. Click it to see the true source of the problem. How much Ram do you have?

A Guy

I have 6 gigabytes of system ram, and my video card has 512 megabytes of ram, and I am running x64 Windows 7 Professional.

What troubles me, is that my system gives no notice of aero disabling itself, I get no error popups or notification bubbles. That's why I thought it might be a malware infection. But like I said, none of the scanners has found anything, even to this day.

EDIT:
Entirely filled in my specs page with my build info. Didn't even realize this forum had that feature XD. I can see it being a huge time saver for both the person needing help and the people giving the help.

Did you update the graphics driver?
NVIDIA DRIVERS 258.96 WHQL

It is :)

The only time it doesn't show a notification is when the WEI index periodically updates itself (it runs on a schedule) and sometimes there is a delay for it to refresh after updating video drivers.

This is likely do to the video playing in firefox. You can check the Event Viewer after it happens, see if see any:

"A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (Windows System Assessment Tool)"
Source: Desktop Window Manager
Event ID: 9010

or

"The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application"
Souce: Desktop Window Manager
Event ID: 9013

Also, windows runs the performance test when the PC is idle, but I have 4 Gigs of Ram, and have never experienced that.

A Guy

i have a similar issue. is there anyway to stop this from happening?

Mine reverts to basic whenever I run exPressit for art work disc covers. A Guy gave you the answer.

I did not know that windows 7 did that... more than likely that is what is causing it, since it always seems to happen at around midnight-1am. It would also explain why it doesn't cause a notification bubble.

Thanks for the help , I feel at ease now that I know its not a malware infection.

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