X applications rendered without window frame and with blank decoration buttons

[kenmanheimer]

Version

10.0.22622.575

WSL Version

• WSL 2
• WSL 1

Kernel Version

5.15.57.1

Distro Version

Ubuntu-18.04

Other Software

x11-apps/bionic,now 7.7+6ubuntu1 amd64
Gnu Emacs 28.0.50

Repro Steps

Launch an X application, like xtem or xclock, from the terminal.

Expected Behavior

See the application window with a grabbable frame, iconify/maximize/quit buttons, and resize handles if you hover the mouse of the corners of the frame.

Actual Behavior

X application windows are being rendered without window frames, and with blank iconify/maximize/quit frame buttons.

• I cannot grab the windows with the missing frames. (Clicks on where the frames should be go to the window or desktop below.)
• The frame buttons still work - I can iconify, maximize and restore, and quit the window using them - but the buttons are blank gray squares, they lack the icon text.
• I'm unable to find most of the window resize drag-handles except for the ones in the upper right corner (near or on the corner of the quit button). However, in some applications (Emacs) the resize handle doesn't work (but it does when the problem isn't happening).

I cleared my session Xresources db (xrdb) to ensure that the problem was not specific to any of my settings. No change.

Since the most recent Windows update (Windows Insider Beta Channel) the problem occurs every time.

The problem was happening sporadically in the last few Windows versions before this update. Sometimes the windows would lack frames and so on, and sometimes when I launched the same application it would have the frames and the buttons would have their text and so on.

Diagnostic Logs

No response

[hideyukn88]

@kenmanheimer, thanks for reporting the issue, do you have the screen capture showing the issue? thanks!

[kenmanheimer]

@kenmanheimer, thanks for reporting the issue, do you have the screen capture showing the issue? thanks!

Sorry, I did not take a screen capture and the problem has gone away in subsequent updates.

Should the issue be closed?

[McIntozh]

You mean like this?

It was working just fine and from one moment to the other, frame and decoration disappeared.
Even a restart does not fix it :(

[hideyukn88]

@McIntozh, thank you for screenshot. I guess your case is due to erratic GPU rendering, would you please disable GPU (display driver) in Windows's device manager and see if it helps? If it does solve the issue, would you please let us know your GPU and its driver version? thanks!

[McIntozh]

I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050, driver is 26.21.14.4112.
What do you mean by disabling the display driver? There is no extra driver installed it came from the windows update.

Also it came into my mind what I did when the problem firstly occured: I had an X-application (rendered correctly) that I wanted to resize. When grabbing the window corner to pull on it, the window completely disappeared. After restarting that application the window frame was gone and had blank decoration buttons. From this day on this affected every window.

[hideyukn88]

@McIntozh, please launch Windows's device manager, and select NVIDIA display driver, then right click to disable. (And while it normally unnecessary, but to make sure GPU is disabled in WSL side, please restart WSL by wsl --shutdown) This way Windows including WSLg render everything in software emulation, thanks!

[McIntozh]

Hi,
aftter a reboot it was working again, then I did the same that initial caused the issue and the application crahed again (after some window resizes), causing the window frame to disappear again. Then I disabled the driver as you proposed but this had no influence on the window rendering, the frame was still missing.
Perhaps it is related to the application (an application written in perl with qt), since other xapps like xterm scale without causing the issue.
But it looks like a reboot sometime solves the problem.

[hideyukn88]

@McIntozh, thanks for trying out, is that app publicly available? And does other Qt based app exhibit same issue? thanks!

[McIntozh]

It is a commercial application compiled especially for our company and not publicly available. Also it may be quite old (not current qt). I tried other qt apps wich are working fine. I also tried WSLs (Debian and Ubuntu) on another machine and they are also working fine with our application. So this seems to be something very specific to my Ubtuntu WSL. Since I have no more information or stacktraces for the cause of the crash and it only affects me with that specific application, I'll just live with it.