New to Rainmeter, and I love it...

[ARMY15R]

...but I seem to be having a problem.

I downloaded Rainmeter about a week ago, and let me tell you, I love it. I spent 4 days with zero sleep educating myself and setting things up (first time in 7 years due to the military that I have had time to fool with my comp). I finally got my first desktop completed, and it looked freakin sweet. But there's a problem...

Late yesterday I launched my first game from my new system (Rift) and it ran well, there were no problems. Afterwards, when I closed the program, my Skins for Rainmeter had become much smaller on my screen (went from full screen, to only top left of the desktop, scaled correctly to itself just not to the rest of the desktop). I didn't change anything in Rainmeter at all, all I did was run a game. I have attempted to search the forums, but to be honest I'm not even positive as to what I'm looking for. I don't believe it's a resolution problem, because my Windows 7 desktop/toolbar looks fine; only my skins through Rainmeter were effected.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, even if all you can do is point me in the direction of what would cause the problem. I'm great at repairing Apaches (that's a helicopter) and cooking...not so much at computers.

Anyway, I hope this isn't a recurring problem that has been solved on this forum a thousand times and I, through my ignorance, failed to locate it. The last thing I would want is for my first post in this forum to waste someone's time.

[ARMY15R]

Well, I have an update. Literally, right after I posted the above message.......I opened Rainmeter again and all was well. After I fistpumped...I realized I still have no idea as to the cause of the problem so that, in the future. I may be able to repair it.

[o0kot0o]

Maybe right click one them > Settings > Uncheck Keep On Screen? could be that

[Falconer]

Hi ARMY15R,
First of all, thank you very much for your service!
Second, I have heard of skins moving after running a game, but not changing size...
That is a resolution thing I think; the rainmeter skins reposition themselves according to your reduced screen resolution while playing the game, but don't move back. Think of the screen edge like a fence that shrinks toward the top left corner when the res goes down and forces the skins into the corner.
I'm not a dev, so I'm not sure what to try. I would ask around on the IRC channel - there's almost always an expert online there.

[JoBu]

Most likely it was the game tripping a DivX or GPU call that the desktop (and rainmeter as an extension) didn't agree with... it happens often with games.

Usually a desktop refresh (or a rainmeter refresh) would resolve the issue... if that's not the case, then the problem is most likely a process tripped by the game that continues to run afterwards that interferes with rainmeter. You can check by noting any process changes in the task manager before and after running the game. I can't think of anything else that it might be, but I'm tired as hell and not very bright on a good day

Best practice: Turn rainmeter off during a game launch. You don't want extra processes beating around in your computer when you hoard it on a game anyways. Anytime you run a game or any application that triple threats* (Heavy Vid, Heavy Input, Heavy Process) you want it to be running by itself. Similar progs to games would be Video and Audio editing software (ProTools ate a computer of mine once) or Engineering Progs, like AutoCads, etc.

Hopefully the refresh will restore your prior state. If it goes deeper than that, then restart rainmeter and reload your theme. I wouldn't even bother tracing processes, unless understanding the issue is really important to you.

Hope something there helps, cheers.

[dragonmage]

http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=809&hilit=RainRez