W7 suddenly thinks my computer is too shit to run Aero w/ cert modeling programs - Hardware & Software

If I open Blender or Google Sketchup, Windows flips its lid and disables Aero making my theme look like total ass and causing eye-blistering screen tear when I scroll in my browser. 3DSMax doesn't seem to cause any issues, interestingly enough. However when it turns off Aero while 3DSMax is open, it makes whatever model I have open at the time fucking explode into polygonal Cthulu. Not good. Though I think that it's just corrupt in the viewport, the model file itself remains fine. I use a custom theme (uxtheme.dll patched to allow this) but I've been using the same one for as long as I've been using W7, which is to say, quite a long time, and I've never had issues. The only thing I've changed recently is that I updated my GPU drivers so I could get the proper Vulkan drivers to run an emulator. Another interesting thing is that, in my usual experience, if it turns off Aero for performance reasons, it states that in a tooltip popup from the taskbar. It doesn't when it does this. It also goes IMMEDIATELY back to normal when I close Blender/Sketchup. My hardware is more than enough to run all this, and I've never had a single issue before updating my GPU drivers through nVidia Experience. I've combed through it and nVidia control panel to find something that could be doing this to no avail. I'm losing my mind. I can't do model work as long as this is happening. Specs, if you don't believe me: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2014/339cc282-0bf7-41cc-a13e-2cd7ba21750e/image.png

Roll back your drivers and see if that helps. If it only started happening after a driver update then that's as good a place to start as any.

That may be the issue, I checked the Windows event log to see if I could find anything and in the application logs, dated every time I have started the two offending programs, sits this: "The Desktop Window Manager was unable to start because composition was disabled by a running application" Thing is, if I roll back the drivers, the reason I updated them no longer works. The Vulkan drivers will be too out of date for them to function on the emulator I've been playing on recently and I'll get shit frames because there's no DirectX implementation and the OpenGL one sucks really hard. I'd really rather avoid having to roll them back, the last known functioning one I had is over a year old because I'm really neglectful about updating drivers. I know. I'm the person IT people despise. ):

You can get old driver versions from nvidias site.

Apparently 368.81 is so old it no longer exists on nVidia's website. It only goes back as far as 385.12 released on July 31, 2017 and is a beta driver.

With the help of guru3d and, inadvertently reddit, I was able to find the driver version I was on previously and reinstalled them. Lost Vulkan support but tbh, the emulator I was running tanked a lot anyway and was frustrating and I don't play any games that use it primarily so what the fuck ever. I'd rather DWM not get bent over and fucked violently every time I wanna work on a modeling project than have proper Vulkan support. I guess this is what I get for refusing to upgrade to W10, ultimately.