Why is my WPF suddenly rebelling?

Question

I've recently completed a fairly large (for one man) WPF project, and started coding something for fun. I was almost done with an app worthy of showing off to friends and colleagues, and I started playing with window sizes - manually resizing the window - just to see what would happen on various screens.

And what happened was - my window got corrupted for certain window sizes, especially at about 100x100 range. I got very confused, and started to remove parts from XAML, my code, everything. But the problem persisted.

Lastly, I created a brand new WPF project - I didn't even change the name - WpfApplication1 it's called. Surely, same artifacts appear. They are more subtle than those of the app, but still clearly visible.

So, what's going on?

I realize that the most obvious answer is to check my graphics card drivers, and I will try downgrading to an earlier release; but meanwhile note that my fairly large for one man-project works flawlessly, and it even uses DirectX shaders! And that I've installed the latest drivers just the week before, when I also reinstalled Windows.

I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2 with all patches, and vanilla Visual Studio with SP1 - no experimental compilers, or anything.

EDIT

• The problem only happens on my machine, if I compile on my machine and run on another the problem is not evident.

• The XAML of the bran new project is simply:

<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainWindow"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
        Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525">
    <Grid>

    </Grid>
</Window>

EDIT 2

It seems that there's some kind of problem with the Latest Catalyst Driver - 11.8. Installing 11.7 fixed the issue as a workaround, as, well, expected. Mystery kinda solved, except for the why...

So does anyone know why the latest catalysts cause havoc with WPF?

Answer 1

Looks like this is a problem with Catalyst 11.8 - see:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=154834&enterthread=y

and

WPF: can't resize window without horrible visual effects

I notice it in VS 2010 as well as our own WPF apps. It's pretty horrible. Seems as though rolling back to Catalyst 11.7 fixes the problem.