Hello there!

For months, I was experiencing difficulties with Microsoft Windows 10 not shutting down properly. The system would hang indefinitely, displaying on the screen: «Shutting down...». The mouse cursor was still responsive and typical disk activity was ongoing. It felt as though the system was waiting for a task to finish. This problem was occurring in a seemingly random fashion, not on every shutdown. Debugging the problem was a slow process because of this.

I searched the Internet for various possible solutions to fix the shutdown problem. I went through the typical solutions, such as setting WaitToKillAppTimeout and HungAppTimeout to low values in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. It did not help. I tried changing the page file size to a smaller one, because I suspected memory management issues. Nothing helped.

To better narrow down the possible causes, I decided to first log out of the user session and then shut down. After a few days, this revealed that it was a user session problem, not a shutdown problem. The system was sometimes hanging at session end. I looked in the Event Viewer for possible explanations. I found that winlogon.exe — the Windows Logon process — was crashing. It was crashing because of a module named verifier.dll. The verifier.dll file is a core component of Microsoft's Driver Verifier (and Application Verifier) utility, a built-in Windows diagnostic tool.

For some reason, I had the Verifier module attached to winlogon.exe. Upon further research, I suspect SecureUXTheme caused this in my case.

The solution was straight-forward:

• Open a command prompt and run: verifier /reset.
• In the Registry Editor, navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\winlogon.exe
• Remove the GlobalFlag and VerifierDLLs subkeys.

I hope this post will be useful to someone out there.

Hello, friends!

I am a happy Windows 7 x64 user since 1st of January 2010. Although, since day one I wasn't happy about the default Aero theme, because it is too transparent and the title bars texts are not visible on dark wallpapers and such. So, last week I thought of doing something different. Here's a Windows Accessible Aero theme done by me, based on the default Aero theme. I just changed what I thought it lacks contrast. I've searched on-line for such themes, but I liked none of them. As such, I publish this theme for others who might need such a theme.

Download the Windows Accessible Aero theme (ZIP archive)

For easiness, I prepared several screen-shots portraying the difference between my theme (Accessible Aero) and the default Aero theme. These screen-shots are a mash-up of different Windows elements, in Basic and Aero modes.

If you like what you see, download the Accessible Aero theme here.

Here is a round-up of what this theme features:

• considerably less transparent glass, dark glass
• white text title bars with black glows, so they are readable irrespective of the background of the window
• increased contrast in the title bars for the Basic mode, when not using Aero and I also adjusted the caption buttons accordingly by enhancing the contrast between the glyphs and the buttons
• a much darker task-bar in Basic mode, making the clock and pop-up titles of the applications running much more readable
• a darker Start menu in Basic mode
• increased contrast for the Alt-Tab application switcher in Basic mode
• added a strong white glow to Alt-Tab app switcher to make the the title visible
• made text fields slightly more visible
• defined a clear difference between active and inactive text fields, making the borders thicker
• a more visible highlighting color for menus, pop-ups menus, while trying to maintain the default look
• file column headers in Explorer or other applications, are enhanced as well; more visible and a more clear border between them
• changed the gray text color of tool tips to black for increased readability
• added dark glow to application titles in task bar and in the thumbnails to avoid situations when the titles are unreadable
• made the address bar, search field and the whole breadcrumb much more readable; brighter background and darker texts
• more visible separator in unlocked task-bar and other types of separators or window resize grippers
• bigger close button in task-bar pop-up thumbnails
• made the task-bar icons less wide, more ergonomic, both in Basic and Aero modes
• made more visible the MDI window buttons: close, minimize and restore/maximize
• restyled the whole task-bar to my personal taste

By now, it is clear what is my main purpose with this theme: readability, accessibility, hence the title. So, it is not about eye-candy, fancy designs, or not even originality. I also published this theme on deviantart.com, for those using dA.

Download the Windows Accessible Aero theme (ZIP archive)

Feel free to send me comments to improve this theme.