Forum Discussion
Ghost windows appearing
Please see the image. What happens is that ghost windows appear on the screen. They have a title bar and border but no contents, and they remain on top of everything else. You cannot interact with them or close them and the application that originally showed them has long been exited and is not running anymore (not in the task bar). If you minimize all desktop windows, they remain. If you restart Explorer they remain. The only solution is to restart the computer. It looks like at some point some soft of desktop or windows manager picks up these title bars and then they remain onscreen until a restart. Seen with Windows 11 23H2 (not tried on 24H2 yet) on multiple machines, never seen with Windows 10. A snooper application which finds an application if you drag a cursor over these windows finds nothing, just the desktop there.
6 Replies
So after a lot of looking around, the fix (for me) is to kill the DWM.exe process. This is the Desktop Window Manager, so it makes sense that this is the culprit! Can't explain WHY it does this, but killing the process definitely removes the frame/s!
I often have this issue with Autodesk 3dsMax, but I had it today with VideoLan Client Player v4 after I closed it.(apparently using it's normal named isn't allowed?)
I found the solution here, so I can't take credit for figuring it out;
https://superuser.com/questions/1894628/ghost-frame-remains-after-switching-monitors
Note that this is not the Windows 11 search ghost window, here is a screen shot showing more windows after using the button to minimize all desktop windows.
Same issue with a Windows GUI application written in PyQt. Started happening on Windows 11.
Try updating the driver and reporting the system issue to Microsoft.
Note that this is not the Windows 11 search ghost window, here is a screen shot showing more windows after using the button to minimize all desktop windows.
Please note that this is not THE infamous Windows 11 search window, multiple windows can get stuck like this, see this screen shot, where the entire desktop was minimized and these windows remained. Seems to be triggered by minimizing and and then restoring applications.
