My screen has a dead "click" zone(invisible window)?

Question

The weirdest thing is happening to me - there is a dead zone on my screen where I can't left-click up on the right side of the Screen. On SO, it covers parts of the toolbar. I can click the left two-thirds of my profile link, but not the right 1/3, and I can't click on the inbox icon, trophy icon, help icon, or stack icon. I also can't click on the right side of the higher hot meta posts. I also can't even close this window normally - the minimize, maximize, and close buttons won't work. If I have an internet tab over to the right, I can't close it.

However, I can RIGHT-CLICK in the dead area, and when I do, it says "CTRL+C," but greyed out.

Is there an invisible window up or something?

Answer 1

I added a second screen, and the box vanished. I then went back the original screen, and it was fine. Maybe the effect from https://xkcd.com/1479/?

Answer 2

I've also had this problem recently on my monitor at work. I get a dead zone in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. The dead area is about the size of the Windows notification area that slides out.

I already have dual monitors, but it only happens on one of them. I've yet to figure out what causes it, or what it even is.

The only way for me to get rid of it, is to restart the PC, or go into task manager and restart the explorer.exe process.

Update: Turns out explorer.exe would only work for me sometimes. The easiest solution is to press the power button on the monitor to turn it off, then back on again.

Answer 3

I know this post was from years ago, but if anyone comes across it later and has an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card (mine is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER), I opened up the NVIDIA Control Panel (I typed that phrase in my windows 10 search bar) and up top there are three menu tabs. Click "Desktop" and turn off "Add Desktop Context Window." This fixed the issue for me. My invisble window was completely invisble in that there was no outline of it; it created a small dead zone in the lower left corner for me.

Answer 4

In Windows you can set windows that can be both hidden (invisible/transparent) and on-top. This is found trough class: StartMenuSizingFrame and with the "ex-style" bit WS_EX_TOPMOST set.

Dead windows can be left behind by orphan processes when (for example) a window (from for example a web browser) ask to navigate to save a file, but then you close the navigation window, before saving and completing the subtask. (This is usually due to poor garbage and error handling.)

You then need to figure out what process that area belongs to. There are two tools for this:

• SPY++ (spyxx.exe) - Found in the VS 2022 tools directory:
  cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\Tools
  Some versions can be also found in this repo.
• wInspector - an AutoHotkey plugin.

You can also try to refresh the video card driver, by:
[Win] + [Ctrl] + [Shift] + B

Answer 5

I have this problem on Windows 10 and was able to resolve it by disabling notifications. If you keep the Windows Notifications on, you have to acknowledge all the current notifications when you experience the dead zone and it should remove it.

If you activate the notification banners (AKA the toasts), you can also see that there is a significant dead zone around the displayed banners (a small one at the left and a large one at the top, assuming your notification icon is at the bottom right). If you deactivate the notification banners, but keep the notifications active, I suspect that the same dead zone is still there, around a 0 pixel banner. I haven't tested Windows 11.