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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.

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sage- You need to run the command window elevated (right click, run as elevated). That will take care of the "Access denied" messages. – Bill Jan 18 at 10:45
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3 Answers

up vote 28 down vote accepted

Restart DWM with (by using a CMD shell window with Administrator permission):

net stop uxsms
net start uxsms

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

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up vote 2 down vote

"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.

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up vote 2 down vote

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.

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