"The image format is unrecognized" depending on monitor

Question

We have a C# WPF project (.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010). It has been tested on both Windows XP and Windows 7 and seems to work fine, but now I have received reports from two customers on the field (both located in Spain for some reason) who cannot start the software.

Looking at the log file I see that they get "The image format is unrecognized" exception (Caused by: Exception from HRESULT: 0x88982F07).

I have googled on the error and I have found that this seems to be that WPF fails to load the Vista PNG icon on Windows XP. But those reports are a couple of years old, surely Microsoft resolved it by now (?), and in my case it works fine on most XP installations. I really don't want to limit the icon appearance on more recent Windows.

The most common use of our application is on Laptops, and one of the users reported that when he connected his laptop to an external monitor the problem got resolved. And when I asked the other one to test the same thing he had the same result.

So my questions are: Do you know if this problem has been resolved by Microsoft? Do you know why it only happens on some Windows XP instances and how it is related to the monitor? And most importantly, do you know what I could do to make our application more robust to this without changing the icon?

Answer 1

I had the same error today, out of the blue, and only on my development machine. The WPF implementation seems to be still buggy.

If I understand this (article) right, it can occur everywhere ICO files are read. In my case it was while setting an icon for the main application window in XAML:

<Window x:Class="MyApp.MainWindow"  Icon="Dashboard.ico" >

The above code failed suddenly, but using a PNG file solved the problem:

<Window x:Class="MyApp.MainWindow"  Icon="Dashboard.png" >