Skins (Blinking, Flickering, Disappear)

[Yincognito]

I've found the reason for the Rainmeter flickering. It's all about the desktop slideshow. When personalization settings for desktop wallpaper are set to "slideshow", Rainmeter goes crazy. I haven't found a way to fix this. Returning to the standard wallpaper settings does not solve the problem. Only reinstalling Windows helps. I hope this information will help developers understand how to bring Rainmeter back to life without reinstalling the system.

Yet again, I just tested it on my system and the slideshow works fine, no flickering or blinking at all (Win 10):

Slideshow Walpapers.jpg

It's interesting, since the blinking problems could be replicated earlier by balala, but IMHO I still think it's either Win 11 if you're on it, or some other particularity of the system (GPU, drivers, hardware acceleration, missing redistributables, etc.) that is causing the problem...

[Aser Lexus]

Really interesting. I have Windows 10 Home, version 22H2.
I tested several times, so I'm sure that in my case the problem with blinking occurs precisely after setting up the wallpaper slideshow.
It would be interesting to know if those who posted earlier used the slideshow option.

[Yincognito]

It would be interesting to know if those who posted earlier used the slideshow option.

Indeed. Even more interesting from my POV would be to know whether they (e.g. balala) can still replicate the blinking issue altogether at this point (even if it's the earlier form, via the WinKey + D hotkey combination), or if the issue automagically solved itself in the meantime. A feedback on that would be helpful, at least it would indicate what possibility to discard, in this case.

[balala]

Ok, just tested. I have a slideshow setting from a while (didn't set it just for this test). When pressing Win + D, get the short blinking. But got the same blinking even when had no wallpaper slideshow set. No blinking normally however, with no keypress.
I definitely wouldn't reinstall Windows for this. I personally will reinstall it however next week, but not due to this issue, but to a SSD replacement (no other choice then reinstalling Windows, as both of you probably figured out). Last year, my computer has started to have more and more software problems as time went by, this is why I finally decided to buy a new SSD (the old SSD has no problems, works perfectly, but it's too small - has only 128 GB - yep, it's an old piece), to get enough place before starting reinstall Windows. I'm telling all this to explain what kind of software problems I have on my computer. Over time I reinstalled my video card driver few times, never got it working better, but I assume this might cause the flickering. When I get reinstalled Windows, I'm gonna give it a try and will come back to tell what's going on, if anyone will still be interested. This will be on the end of next week (I hope).

[Yincognito]

get the short blinking

Thanks for testing! Frankly, I don't even know how the offending blinking looks like. If it's the one time redrawing of the skin after WinKey + D, it did happen to me from the first time I tried replicating what the OP experienced (and I mentioned it between brackets here), it's just that I never considered it a "problem" or something that would need "fixing" - that's how windows (and Windows) work:

Desktop_2024_01_20_22_31_38_121-ezgif.com-optimize.gif

Above, I WinKey + D between Notapad++ and some of my skins (set to Stay Topmost) and Illustro (set to Normal). There is one instance where the "blinking" happens twice in succession indeed at the beginning of the GIF, but that might be just me keeping my finger on those hotkeys too much or something - in other words, I still don't see it as an issue. Not sure how the OP's problem looks like, if it's more serious than that...

P.S. I didn't set my background to slideshow for the above. Hardware acceleration is off. Windows auto selects which GPU it uses to display Rainmeter in its graphic settings, most likely the integrated AMD Radeon Vega 6 used for most of the other desktop stuff. By the way, the capture looks worse than the actual experience is, especially when reasonably pressing those buttons.

[balala]

Frankly, I don't even know how the offending blinking looks like. If it's the one time redrawing of the skin after WinKey + D, it did happen to me from the first time I tried replicating what the OP experienced (and I mentioned it between brackets here), it's just that I never considered it a "problem" or something that would need "fixing" - that's how windows (and Windows) work:

This is what I did talk about. I didn't consider this a problem either, but had it and when OP asked, I told I see this on my system as well.

[Yincognito]

This is what I did talk about. I didn't consider this a problem either, but had it and when OP asked, I told I see this on my system as well.

Ah, I see - thanks for clarifying this one.

[Aser Lexus]

Hi guys,

I want to introduce another solution to the Rainmeter flickering or transparency problem.

To solve the problem, go to the folders:
C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
and delete the shortcuts "Shows Desktop.lnk" in those folders. After that reboot the System.

If similar problems occur again, simply repeat these steps.