Visual Studio 2010 "Smudging"

Question

After purchasing a new monitor and setting up a dual monitor display, VS 2010 is smudging. I'm not really sure how to describe it, but it is really annoying. See here:

I've tried reinstalling VS, but no luck. My video card is a ATI Radeon HD 5770, and I'm using Catalyst Control Center drivers for it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This bug report on Microsoft Connect suggests symptoms similar to those you describe.

The simple fix might be to turn off the "rich client visual experience". To do that, follow these steps:

1. From the "Tools" menu, select "Options".
2. Expand the "Environment" category, and select "General".
3. Uncheck the box labeled "Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance".
4. Uncheck the box labeled "Enable rich client visual experience".
5. You might also try turning off "Use hardware graphics acceleration if available".
6. Click OK.

   

I realize this isn't a particularly good long-term solution, but it might help to make Visual Studio usable for you. There are still some problems like this that crop up since they switched the user interface to WPF. It's really difficult to justify switching client applications to WPF if they can't get it quite right in their flagship development software.

Of course, a lot of things were significantly improved from the beta versions to the RTM—fonts in the editor window were the big one, although they're still not exactly the same in VS 2010 as they were in previous versions. It appears that certain client configurations can still cause strange bugs like this one to appear. For what it's worth, I've never personally experienced this on any of the several different machines I run VS on.