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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