Strange Windows User Dependent Rendering Issue

[Alex Scott]

For the last... way too long, I've been battling an issue that effects every application which uses Chromium (chrome, edge, steam, discord, twitch, adobe creative cloud, etc...). When I open the application, I get a blank white or black screen, except for google chrome itself - that one is a transparent window that is entirely invisible and shows strange artifacting.

In the troubleshooting I've done, I've ruled out anything system wide (only effects one user profile), driver issues (did a total nvidia driver wipe using DDU in windows safe mode), hardware issues (issue has persisted through a GPU upgrade), cache corruption (deleting the cache files change nothing). The issue is mitigated by running in windows compatibility mode or disabling hardware acceleration via command line switch/application setting.

This behavior only happens in my primary user profile. When I log in to a freshly made test account, all the applications work without issue. When I use the "runas" command in powershell to execute the applications as the broken profile while logged in as the clean profile, the applications break again.

Is there a file or setting that is user profile specific in windows that Chromium uses that would effect the window rendering in this way?

[Justin Novosad]

When you say that deleting cache files changed nothing, what files are we talking about exactly?  Have you tried deleting the contents of C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\ShaderCache\GPUCache ?

[Sunny Sachanandani]

Given that this affects multiple Chromium based browsers/apps, it's tied to a specific Windows user profile, and it goes away with disabling GPU acceleration, it could be a corrupt driver shader cache e.g. on my machine there's a "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\NVIDIA\DXCache" where I presume the NVidia driver caches intermediate D3D shader compilation artifacts. Maybe try deleting it?