How to re-enable aero effects in Windows 7 after it has crashed?

Question

Ocassionally aero effects crash. Is there a way to re-enable the effects in Windows 7 after a crash happens?

i.e. restarting a service or terminatating a process and letting it restart automaticially or manually loading it?

Problem symptoms; in

Control Panel \ Appearance and Personalization \ Personalization

The standard "Window Color" option is not available it just appears as "Basic"

Reboot will solve this issue, but would like to avoid that if possible.

Answer 1

Restart DWM with:

net stop uxsms
net start uxsms

It's the same service that crashes and is also known as the Desktop Windows Manager.

Answer 2

"taskkill /f /im dwm.exe" always did it for me, though Diago's answer is cleaner. Killing the process should get the DWM's helper service to restart it pretty much right away.

Answer 3

For me, when that happens I also have a wrong screen resolution. After I set it to the right resolution, in the Settings I can chose Aero as the Design again.

Answer 4

None of these answers seems to work for me due to permissions perhaps. I am able to stop and restart the desktop window manager service by doing the following and this does accomplish the result:

1. Start "Services" by typing Services into the search window. (I had done this previously by running a command I pulled off the web, but couldn't find it just now and got lucky with the search.)

2. Stop the service "Desktop Window Manager Service Manager"

3. Start the service "Desktop Window Manager Service Manager"

I think this is doing the same thing that @Diago recommended, but for some reason I get the following when I tried his solution:

C:\>net stop uxsms
System error 5 has occurred.

Access is denied.

C:\>net start uxsms
System error 5 has occurred.

Access is denied.

C:\>

With taskkill as recommended by @Phoshi, it didn't find the process:

C:\>taskkill /f /im dwm.exe
ERROR: The process "dwm.exe" not found.

C:\>