• Multiplayer source games disable dwm composition
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Since the last engine update valve released a while back, every time I launch a source multiplayer game on the current engine, the game disables composition and essentially switches windows to Basic. This affects Garrysmod, Day of Defeat Source, Counterstrike Source, Team Fortress 2, Halflife 2 Deathmatch, and both Left 4 Dead games. It does not affect mods that run on older versions of the engine like Synergy, and it does not affect single player source engine games like Halflife 2 Episode 2. This behavior does not occur on any other game I play. Valve's support has just given me the run around of installing up to date video drivers ( first thing I tried ), resetting game configurations, and anything except fixing the problem. I have my preferences set under advanced system settings to not allow Windows 7 to decide something needs disabled, and I have the SuppressDisableCompositionUI DWORD in the registry set to 1, to no avail. None of these games have desktop composition disabled in their compatibility settings. My computer: i7 920 @ 2.67ghz ATI Radeon 6870, 1GB 6GB ram Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Dual 1680x1050 monitors I'm running the most recent drivers for my video card am not behind in windows updates. I play most source games in a fullscreen window ( -sw -noborder - w 1680 -h 1050 ) so I can do other things while I'm waiting for a person to join, a level to load, or a download to finish. Having aero disabled causes the OS to hang and possibly crash the game as well as not offering any performance increase. I've spent a lot of time googling that hasn't been very fruitful - most people seem to want to know how to disable it or it is related to a specific program's settings and their solutions are not relevant to the problem. My event viewer is full of messages like these: A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (hl2.exe) The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application Which tells me this is likely intentional. What can I do to stop this behavior?
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