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(Re)start Desktop Window Manager

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Friday, May 5, 2017 9:16 PM

Does anyone know how to manually start the desktop window manager under Windows 10? dwm.exe crashes occasionally on one of my machines when under heavy load causing most of my open windows to go blank. Logging out or restarting fixes the issue but I'd like to not lose the unsaved work. Under Win 7 I could cycle the UXSMS service but on 10 it appears the DWM is started by winlogon and is no longer a service. 

Any ideas?

All replies (1)

Friday, May 5, 2017 10:44 PM

on 10 it appears the DWM is started by winlogon 

Yes.  I have two.  I'm wondering if that is as a result of using Remote Desktop?  In that case I can recommend using it; it seems I can transfer a session from one machine to another using it.  So, see if you can pick up your problem session using Remote Desktop and then pass it back by logging in again.  Meanwhile I can try to keep track of my DWM Id and ParentProcessId to know what is happening each time I do this

PS>Get-WMIObject Win32_Process | where Name -match "DWM" | fl * | out-string -stream | select-string "parent"

ParentProcessId            : 940
ParentProcessId            : 2260


PS>Get-Process dwm

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
                      --  -- 
   1224     182   209604     130244   8,971.72   1128   1 dwm
    414      29    20656      23960       4.42   4320   3 dwm


PS>Get-Process | where Id -EQ "940"

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
                      --  -- 
    234      11     2368      10252       2.09    940   1 winlogon


PS>Get-Process | where Id -EQ "2260"

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
                      --  -- 
    180       8     1764       6656       0.19   2260   3 winlogon


PS>

Robert Aldwinckle