I have used DisplayFusion for a few years, and I paid for it. I love it and it served me well till about a year ago. I didn't realise that DisplayFusion was part of an annoying problem that my PC developed.
After booting all worked well, but after about 30 mins I saw several problems appear. My mouse would gradually get less and less responsive, taking 2 or 3 secs to respond to a movement or a mouse button click. It then progressed to the mouse moving incredibly small amounts across the screen, with each movement of the mouse. This was most apparent in File Explorer, and Chrome (and all other browsers I tried.) At about the 30min mark, File explorer windows would start flashing, and/or the scroll bar in File Explorer would flash.
Over the last year in an attempt to solve this issue, I did 3 complete reinstalls of Win10 (yes, reformatting, creating partitions, etc), and each time for 3 or so weeks the problem was solved, but then each time the same issues reappeared. I tried uninstalling various programmes, but no fix. I ran batch files to disable background Adobe processes and heaps more. About two weeks ago I simply exited DispalyFusion and the problem immediately disappeared! After more endless hours I have found that disabling DisplayFusion's wallpaper management. I can leave all the other settings of DisplayFusion enabled and my system is stable.

I have two monitors. On the main monitor DisplayFusion played a slideshow of Nasa's picture of the day, and my secondary monitor played a slideshow of images I had in a folder that favourite images of mine.

So after months of reinstalls, endless experiments, and continuing frustrating issues with my PC, I now know that simply turning off DisplayFusion's management of my wallpaper, ALL the issues disappear, turning that feature back off and the problem happens again. To turn the problem issues on and off no reboot is needed. Magic!

Yes, a very long post, but I hope my essay helps other people.

Does Binary Fortress have any comments?

I've just started to experience exactly this - after years of happy DisplayFusion usage.

I've just upgraded to Windows 10 2020H2 which now supports (or forces - haven't figured it out yet...) showing browser tabs as open apps on the Task Bar.

I think it is this change - or something else in the new Windows 10 update - that is causing havoc with DisplayFusion.

I've disabled Multi-Monitor Taskbars and will wait to see how this pans out.

Cheers.

Same issue. After Win 10 20H2 update, PC started choking.
Dual 24" LCDs, working perfectly for years, then Microsoft fixes things.
I'm guessing there will be a patch for DF pretty soon.

It does help that I am not the only one that has noticed this behaviour. In my case I suspected that the issue lay with other programs and was total frustrated for months. Reinstall, reinstall, etc. Probably 100 hours of lost time. I guess that is what I get for being so old!!

I couldn't find this issue being discussed, and so until your guys responded I was still doubting myself. And yes it had all worked so wonderfully for years. What really confused me was that the problem self corrected on reboot, but alas only for about 20 mins. When it appeared, then it got worse and worse with time, until I rebooted. Like some sort of buffer was filling up?

I'm hopping that Binary Fortress will comment.

Of course I mean "hoping"

I sent them an email, they are looking into it.

Good stuff Terry.

Odd how you've been suffering for months Doug - if it is to do with the Windows update. Maybe you were 'lucky enough' to upgrade to the new Windows a while ago?

Anyway, hopefully it'll get addressed soon.

Re:
"Odd how you've been suffering for months Doug - if it is to do with the Windows update. Maybe you were 'lucky enough' to upgrade to the new Windows a while ago?"

Yes, Karl vosper,

It IS some months. Thank you for trying to suggest that I am not truthful!
I never said that it was due to any particular Win upgrade. That was your assumption for whatever reason. Win 2004 is not the only upgrade in the last year. There are, in fact, a couple a month.

I reinstalled Windows 3 times. Each time I downloaded the latest Win 10 release. And no, I am not a member of "Windows Insider".

Looking back at the timing of Win10 upgrades, yes, it was clearly before Win2004.

Once I found the cause of my long term problems, I made a very long post to carefully describe the procedure I went through to discover the cause; ie to give Binary Fortress as much info as I could.

Karl, in fact no "upgrade" was ever mentioned. What I said was "about a year ago". That's all. maybe it was 1909, or even before.

Thank you for your feedback.

There has been a suggestion that the problem first appeared with Win 2004. I have no idea what update of Windows the cause of this issue was or even if it was a Win update IMHO. All I know is that it was MANY months ago. I am old and have a shitload of software installed. The decision to reformat, etc, is not taken lightly. At my age, a clean re-installation of Win 10 and all my software is truly daunting! My error was to never suspect that DisplayFusion was the cause for so long.

And just to be clear I don't hold anyone to blame, definitely not Binary Fortress

Interesting...

I recently updated to 2004, and my DisplayFusion has been acting kind of weird. I haven't had any of the performance issues yet (I just updated less than a week ago), but the display fusion task bar keeps "blinking", where the start button vanishes and re-appears after a second.

I've also noticed that DisplayFusion is visible over fullscreen applications even though that settings is unticked in the settings.

I'll go ahead and switch on the beta update notifications so I can switch to the beta and test it out when it's out.

I am surprised with the range of issues people are having. A part of the reason that I took so long to diagnose my problems is that all aspects of Displayfusion were working OK. All my issues were with mouse responsiveness, File Explorer flashing on and off, and eventually freezing. The end result was a total freeze, even Taskmanager froze and recovery was only possible by doing a complete reset. Every the old reliable CTRL-ALT-DEL did not response. But disable DF's management of the wallpaper, all these issues disappear.

If Binary Fortress read this: With a fresh reboot, all worked well for maybe 15-20mins, then the mouse would start to slowup, then File Explorer would gradually slow more and more. So perhaps the problem was related to my wallpaper getting refreshing a new image, often set at 10 - 30 mins intervals.

Sounds good. I've also noticed my screensaver has stopped working. Computer is remaining unlocked now since it never kicks in. Can't tell if that's DisplayFusion or windows doing something with the activity timers or w/e.

I have the latest beta already installed, so just waiting for you guys to push your new one in the next couple weeks

Hi Owen,

I have 10 minutes set. I assume maybe it's a chrome tab currently preventing Display Fusion from kicking the screensaver in.

I am very ill. I will attempt to try this soon.

Hi @Owen

I see that 9.7.1 Beta 5 was released today and that the change notes seem to tackle a few of the issues in this thread.

Are we set to install this and give it a go?

Thanks.

Cool, thanks Owen.

In general, it seems to have cured the issues I was seeing previously, thanks.

Only one thing I have noticed - and it's an odd one - is that the MS Edge browser tab appears on both Taskbars if it is on the 'DisplayFusion' taskbar screen. This does not happen with any other application that I can see (including other browsers like Chrome).

I'll try to explain a bit more...

If I have the Edge browser open on my 'Windows taskbar' screen, the tab ONLY appears on that screen. If I have the Edge browser open on my 'DisplayFusion taskbar' screen, the tab appears on both taskbars.

Hopefully the attached screen shots help. The Edge browser is open on my 'Display Fusion taskbar' screen only. Tricky to try and explain with words. Happy to take a quick video for you if that will help...

Other than that, looking good...

Cheers.

Karl.

Well,

Regarding the instability problem.. Since I last year installed "Win 10 19.04" I had the problem, that after 6 Hour's of uptime, my system began to stutter. It wasn't noticable, but after 8-10 Hours it was nearly impossible to use the system without a restart. Dragging chrome tabs out of its window to its own window or another display, was slow and laggy. Adding the TAB back to another existing window it was just popping in and out until it after some sec docked into the window. Moving the mouse around felt laggy and playing games u could feel small fps drops and mouse stutter.

Since the beginning of this year I upgraded my hardware. I never thought it would be because of the hardware, since my old hardware already was highend, so the problem persisted.

A month ago I did a clean installation of windows, the problem persisted still. Now the last 5 days I was playing around with disabling services in msconfig, sorting out autostart programms and found that DisplayFusion was causing the problem. Turning DF off and letting the system run for 24 hours I have never been happier about to see my system working smooth AF without a restart. Even docking browser tabs to browser window felt super smooth and totaly responsive.

For now I will give the Beta a try and hope that this will fix this mess

Regards Pierre

Trying to download but only the zip seems to work, installer and msi result in a 404 error.
Would love to update as I'am also having lots of instability issues with taskbars since 20H2

@Owen - this shows the 'Windows' taskbar on the right hand screen and 'DisplayFusion' taskbar on the left.

From what I have seen, it is only the Edge browser that gets 'stuck' on the Windows taskbar.

Hope this helps...

Download is ok now.
Just installed and enabled the taskbar, hope it's more stable and if so. Will let you know..

Settings interface has a nice update, looks better in my opinion.

Hello Owen,

thanks for your response.
Yes, the only thing I use DF for is to manage my wallpapers across my displays and in the login/lock screen. (Edit: Other functions used (mostly default settings): "Wallpapers, Lock Screen, Window Snapping, Window Management, Mouse Management, Alt+Tab)
Sadly even after upgrading to the latest BETA I'm still facing the problem, that my system begins to stutter after some hours of uptime.

The option "Automatically Pick an accent colour from my background" was never activated. So it can't be that

Regards Pierre

@Owen, thanks for your response. Hehe tbh I realy hope it's not because of that. It looks disgusting seeing the wallpaper changing that way. But well.. I will give it a try and reply back in 10 hours.

@Owen,
yeah, it's definitly "Use transitions when changing wallpaper" that was causing the slow down I had since Win10 19.04. My system was now running fine for 19 Hours without any problems. Since u sugested to deactivate it, I guess I'm not the first person experiencing this problem. Do u have a suggestion how this could be fixed from my side, or is that something DF isn't able to handle right now/at the moment on Win10 ?

Regards Pierre

@Owen, thanks for your help/suggestions. Atleast I know they reason for my problem now
Well, I would love to have a fix for this function in the future, since it's way more pleasant to have transitions between wallpapers, but for now I can live without it

Regards Pierre

I don't know if this is the beta (Beta 6) that fixed it or a recent update to windows (19041.610) that fixed it, but my screen saver is working again. Just figured I'd update on that.

The last post I made to this discussion was that I was too ill to reply to :

"@DougPrice Could you try heading to Windows Settings > Personalization > Colours, and disabling "Automatically Pick an accent colour from my background" and see if that helps?"

My apologies for the awful delay, but the fact is that my (declining) health means that I am only strong enough to devote 1-2 hours a day to my P, and that includes time taken to watch TV on my PC. I'm sorry, but I can't change that.

I had proved to my satisfaction that the instability I had noticed on my PC for some months disappeared after two changes:
1. I made an expensive to Adobe Acrobat from V2017 to 2020
2. I disabled DisplayFusion from managing my wallpapers (dual monitors)

The bulk of my instability issues were caused by wallpaper management.

You asked "@DougPrice Could you try heading to Windows Settings > Personalization > Colours, and disabling "Automatically Pick an accent colour from my background" and see if that helps?". At first my reaction was, "I've never played with that!" But when I did check, that option was enabled!! I have no idea why this had been enabled or what program did it.

I can now confirm the following. All instability in Win10 v2004 has disappeared after:
1. Acrobat upgraded (the full version, not just the Acrobat reader)
2. I disabled "Automatically Pick an accent colour from my background" in Winows Settings (ie a Microsoft setting), as you suggested.
and 3. I am still using the SAME version of DisplayFusion "DisplayFusion Pro 9.7 Windows 10 Pro 2004 (10.0.19041)" that I was using when I first posted the problem. (I was the OP 3 weeks ago)

I am so sorry that my reply time is so slow. Before commenting I always try to cross check things, and given my health, that doesn't happen overnight. It's a very sad fact that we all get old.

Remember that 20 days ago, I said, "And just to be clear I don't hold anyone to blame, definitely not Binary Fortress". This crazy world always wants to blame someone.

Please email your paying customers when there is any software update. I don't have the time to trial Beta versions.

I hope this helps
Regards,
Doug
Australia