The Old New Thing

May 2012 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Why are the Windows 7 system notification icons colorless?

May 7, 2012 May 7, 2012 05/7/12
Raymond Chen
Mike wondered why the system notification icons went colorless in Windows 7 and why they went back to regular tooltips instead of the custom tooltips. I don't know either, so I asked Larry Osterman, who was in charge of the Volume icon. And he didn't know either. He was merely given new icons by the design team. But that doesn't stop...

How does the MultiByteToWideChar function treat invalid characters?

May 4, 2012 May 4, 2012 05/4/12
Raymond Chen
The flag controls how the function treats invalid characters. Some people claim that the following sentences in the documentation are contradictory: "Starting with Windows Vista, the function does not drop illegal code points if the application does not set the flag." "Windows XP: If this flag is not set, the function silently ...

Why is there sometimes a long delay between pressing a hotkey for a shortcut and opening the shortcut?

May 2, 2012 May 2, 2012 05/2/12
Raymond Chen
Via a customer liaison, we received a problem report from a customer. The customer is facing issues with delayed desponses to opening a .lnk file by pressing its keyboard shortcut hotkey. This delay does not appear when the shortcut is double-clicked. For example, the customer has created a shortcut to Notepad and assigned it the shortcut ...