Re: Ghost Kkd Windows Xp Sp3 2013 V1
Laverne Levenstein
It is particularly noticeable when I display an image full screen in Preview, or when I am working on a photo in Photoshop (or Lightroom, Capture One, etc.). I can see 'ghostly' elements of a Safari window (e.g. address bar, Back button, etc.) at the top of the window, behind the image. Sometimes the 'ghost' window can also cause light patches to appear in other areas of the screen as well.
Stranger still, I took a screenshot of the problem, and it doesn't show up in the screenshot file! So, I am attaching photos taken with my phone. These show examples of an image in full screen in Preview and a Photoshop window. In all cases, there is no actual Safari window open behind them.
Every once in a while an application will "crash" or otherwise stop working, typically this is Brave, but not always. The problem is that when they stop working I'm left with a "ghost" window that lingers and cannot be interacted with. If I do a "Windows Key" + D it minimizes with all other active windows and comes back when I show the desktop again. It does not respond to clicks and cannot be removed. What I'm looking for is some command to reset whatever is causing that "ghost" app to persist.
I waited for it to happen again and tried xkill. Unfortunately the click goes right thru the visualization of the ghost window and targets plasma, thus killing it. Plasma then restarts itself and the ghost window remains. I also checked for any running brave tasks and nothing exists. It acts as if it's just a visual artifact.
I started researching the compositor and KDE Desktop Effects. As it turns out, it appears to be related to the "Translucency" Desktop Effect enabled within KDE. If I go in and disable Translucency within the Desktop Effects applet, the ghost window vanishes. I can then re-enable Translucency and it's gone for good. Very strange.
When I hit different features, it seems that the pop-up window that is supposed to prompt you for using the feature pops open invisibly. I know that it is open because when I click anywhere it makes the ping sound that windows does when you do something wrong. The only way to exit the screen is to hit ESC. No amount of trickery can get it to open, it won't do it for me in new windows, no restarting or different file types etc etc etc. I've done a fully uninstall and reinstall as well.
So the issue is compounded first by the fact that I'm attempting to use the version that installs through the windows app store since it comes through our company firewall, so I can't just install the newest desktop version unfortunately.
I enabled tracking and ran some tests but no errors come up. I don't think it's technically flagging it as an error, since it seems to think the window is open when it opens, as it disables any clicking outside of the window.
i am using ghost with pe 5 on dell machines. i created an new image using windows 11 23H2 and ghost stops at 50% with no errors. Network admin worked with me for two hours and no errors other than just stopping.
the first time is mentioned framenet. so i checked and my framenet was not installed (all versions). i installed them and retested. now i got the same error but a mention of runtime library. i downloaded and installed c++ distri library, cleaned up image and ghosted.
If running in winpe environment how was the machine shut down. If the machine was shutdown forcable it may leave a log bit on the drive try using -ntil -ntic -ntexact command line parameters for ghost
It interferes especially when trying to type formulas. I cannot close it because it is not considered a file but the application. I have looked for personal.xlsb, which I don't have in any startup folder. I have turned on and off DDE. I have done a full scrape off and reinstall and the behavior continues.
The only work around that works is to open the laptop monitor so I can move it out of the way. However, it will continue to get in the way. If I reboot i can go a while without experiencing it, but it always comes back to haunt me.
However, it occurred to me that it was jumping to whatever monitior had the active window. I downloaded the new NVIDIA driver package - the big one, not the minor push updates - and haven't seen it since. That was only two days ago.
I am crossing my fingers, but I started to notice a 'flash' related to duplicating windows and viewing on different screens. I updated my NVIDIA driver to the new package - the full packages don't seem to come over push mechanisms. And I have not seen the problem in the days since I upgraded.
I've tried all the various "things to try" that many people have posted here and elsewhere . . . all to no avail. No matter what I tried, the 'ghost' was always there IF I opened Excel full-screen (i.e. maximized). If I had foresight of mind to close Excel non-maximized, then when I'd re-open it things were fine (no ghost).
BUT . . . . what DID work for me . . . was setting the properties for the Excel icon (on my Quick Launch Bar, would be same for your desktop app-launch icon) to "Run As Administrator" . . . see attached screen-shot.
I'm running a script that opens a program with title 'Abc' and does stuff, waits for it to do stuff, and then closes and repeats. Every once in a while the program will freeze with no visible or differentiating text, and my built in time-out mechanism doesn't work (for some reason). I noticed that when the program freezes the Window Info tool shows that the title remains the same, and that the Class changes to 'Ghost'. Which seems reasonable.
So, why is the extra constraint actually making the condition easier to be met? I thought that the WinExist advanced options are supposed to be an AND condition, meaning the TITLE has to match AND the CLASS has to match.
It is associated with a process, the code you just gave is pretty much what I'm currently doing. What I need to know now is how to get WinExists() to wait until the window I'm specifying actually exists (both title and class). I have a feeling that WinExists("[TITLE:Abc;... is TRUE when it just sees a title of 'Abc'. I need it to wait until both the title is 'Abc' and the class is 'Ghost'.
This feature is called window ghosting. Basically what happens is if the window manager decides the window is hung, it will capture the contents of it's client area, and create a window on the screen with the class 'ghost', with the contents it was able to capture, and the window styles of the original window(in most cases, iirc). So the window you see on screen when the app is not responding is not actually the app's window, just a replacement that will hang around until the thread responsible for that window starts responding again. The menubar is gone because the fake window does not have a menu, just extra space for it which is painted white. A disabled menubar would probably cause support problems.
@monoceres: No, you missed the point. The Ghost class window belongs to the window manager, not the process that hung. There is likely a way to get the hung process ID, but it has nothing to do with the Ghost window.
You call the IsHungAppWindow function to determine if Microsoft Windows considers that a specified application is not responding. An application is considered to be not responding if it is not waiting for input, is not in startup processing, and has not called PeekMessage within the internal timeout period of 5 seconds.
This was a very good suggestion. It seems to have worked perfectly. In summary: instead of checking for the CLASS of a hung window to be 'Ghost', I should use the windows API to have it determine whether the window is actually hung. My side script can then kill the process.
So, I have a home version of Win10. There's an admin account and then user accounts for the family. When I log in to my account as an ordinary user and view the processes via taskmanager it shows that another user is "disconnected" in the status but their account is using 0.1-0.3% CPU and about 300MB of memory. The user hasn't logged on since boot and there are no remote sessions.
When, for example in procexp64, I try to kill the processes it seems they will all end except sihost, if you kill that one Windows starts all the other processes up and a new copy of sihost too.
b1e95dc632