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Is it possible to do? It was easy to disable it in Vista and 7, and slightly more complicated but nonetheless easy to do in 8 and 8.1 as well.

Can it be done on Windows 10 reliably and repeatedly? It seems to work on a fresh install if you disable explorer, then suspend winlogon, then disable dwm. You can then proceed to reopen explorer and resume winlogon. However, after a few tries, the method no longer works. Dism and sfc/scannow seem to fix it, but that only works a few times as well. Any insight on this please?

Archipsops
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I can disable DWM on Windows 10 too. But I can agree that it is more hard then on the Win 8.1. In Process Explorer with Administrative privilegies you have to do suspend explorer.exe -> kill dwm.exe so many times as long as the theme without DWM will appear at the moment on the top of the windows* (when I tested it without doing this, the Windows 10 always got stuck)!*! -> then kill explorer.exe -> suspend winlogon.exe -> kill dwm.exe. Now you can start explorer.exe and it will works, but without modern parts (ex. Start, Searching, popups with sound, network etc.).

!*! Here the winlogon.exe can log out you and the graphics driver crash. This is the worst step.

Known issues:

  1. Sometimes Process Explorer crashes so I'm recommending have open Task Manager from Windows 10 too (the best thing = copy procexp.exe into System32 folder for easy launching).
  2. When you'll resume the winlogon.exe process, the dwm.exe will start immediately, so you can't.
  3. Rendering engine of the IE can work without DWM.
  4. Graphics driver often crashing and returning into use the "Basic Microsoft display adapter".

Screenshot: http://imgup.cz/images/2016/06/11/Win_10killedDWM.png

magicandre1981
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Petr_Marak
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  • How does the taskbar work without DWM? Any screenshots? – Anixx Jul 18 '16 at 21:57
  • @Anixx I know this is a year late, but just for reference, the taskbar doesn't appear at all. When you minimise windows they turn into little "tray" (I'm not sure what they are called) title bars that just show the window title and buttons. It's like what happens if you minimise a spreadsheet in Excel. –  Sep 11 '17 at 09:12
  • Thanks. This means the taskbar is not running. The same happens if you exit Explorer in any Windows version... So, the taskbar is a Metro app now?... – Anixx Sep 11 '17 at 11:57
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    @Sonickyle27 By the way, some people disable DWM by renaming rundll32.exe into dwm.exe under Win8.x I do not know if it would work under Win10 – Anixx Sep 11 '17 at 12:43
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    Most of Explorer relies on the DWM running, and will refuse to work without it. I've tried force disabling DWM by suspending Winlogin and while it works and you get the basic theme, Windows will actually blue screen after a while. I've had better luck with alternative shells, such as Blackbox for Windows and BBLean, but they haven't been updated in some time and like to crash a lot when running on Windows 10. –  Sep 12 '17 at 09:53
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    Actually BBZero seems to be maintained, so if you need a full alternative shell, that looks like the one to go for. –  Sep 12 '17 at 10:23
  • What about the property Composition in the key Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM ? The property EnableAeroPeek is set when Aero Peek is disabled from settings so I suppose the Composition property should also have some effect. – Bemipefe Oct 18 '19 at 10:40
  • This question comes like 5 years later, but I'm incredibly surprised nobody has asked this yet: **the screenshot shows cmd.exe is semitransparent. How is this happening if composition has been disabled?** The only two possibilities I can come up with is that the OS is switching to a CPU-drawn fallback compositor (...?!), or that this technique isn't truly disabling composition, just breaking a bunch of stuff. – i336_ Aug 03 '21 at 13:51
  • @i336_ When cmd.exe is opened in Windows Preinstallation Environment (for example during Windows installation), transparency can be set in its settings and it works. I'm sure no composition is running there (no dwm.exe), so it apparently is not required for that. – Petr_Marak Aug 04 '21 at 15:35
  • Thanks for the reply. That's very interesting, and a tad surprising; perhaps Windows *is* using a CPU compositor then. I'm definitely having a look into this when I next play around with Windows again. (Using Linux + X11 without any form of compositing running, I do see the occasional tear - as well as fractionally lower input round-trip latency. So the news that Windows seems to have a backup CPU compositor is just... that much more annoying :) ) – i336_ Aug 04 '21 at 16:39
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    @i336_ For full window transparency your Windows OS just needs to support layered windows, a functionality available since Windows 2000. It's also used for animating menu (item) / tooltip fade ins and outs and drag and drop ghosts. It doesn't need that level of "composition" as known from DWM nowadays. Check https://web.archive.org/web/20010610183909/http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/layerwin.htm for more info. – Ray Sep 16 '21 at 15:17
  • @Ray Thanks very much for taking the time, TIL. I get the impression this was basically CPU-side compositing (\*with\* *multiple* backward-compatibility crutches), and optimized for the ~Pentium era at that. I just remembered reading a while back about how the Win9x (possibly 3.x?) kernel(s) would JIT the CPU instructions when performing blits to gain maximum performance. I wonder if similar things were being done here, too. – i336_ Sep 17 '21 at 05:49
  • That page mixes cursor drop shadows in with all the other functionality, but given the sheer amount of repaints necessary to support that, I wonder if cursors were special-cased where hardware support was available. I understand modern GPUs support overlay planes, and I've read about X11's positively byzantine architecture to support the snowflake overlay-plane-based graphics systems in SGIs and Suns back in the day, and I've also seen (on various older x86 boxes) info about "hardware cursor"s being supported. I'm curious where all this was at in contemporary hardware back in the day. – i336_ Sep 17 '21 at 05:59
  • @i336_ As said in the article, a layered window does not cause repaints when moving over others as it's composited. Don't forget GDI 2D hardware acceleration was a thing back then. I'm indeed not sure about the cursor drop shadow being a layered window, it should be a hardware overlay after all (except when you move a window in which it will be faked to move perfectly with it). Raymond Chen's OldNewThing blog is probably a good first source in (in)validating my memories here. – Ray Sep 18 '21 at 08:36