Major iTunes Windows 7 Aero/Basic Theme Problem

Question

Major iTunes Windows 7 Aero/Basic Theme Problem

A couple of days ago, I had to reinstall Windows 7 (and during the process, upgraded from Professional to Ultimate). I had everything installed back perfectly the way it was and everything was fine. But today, iTunes has started spazzing out, really badly. When it is open, iTunes will steal focus, the screen will black out, then come back a second later in Windows 7 Basic Theme (sometimes with a pop-up alerting me of this). A second later it will revert back to Windows 7 Areo, with the iTunes window being slightly bigger than my screen. Around 15 seconds later, this will happen again. And again. And again. And again. Without limit.

When I click on the notification and print screen the pop-up (as it's too fast to read) it says:

"The Colour Scheme Has Been Changed

The following program has peformed an action that requires Windows to temporarily change the colour scheme to Windows 7 Basic.

Program: Apple

Publisher: Apple, Inc.

Process Identifer (PID): 1796 [this seems to be different every time, obviously]

Windows will automatically change the colour scheme back to Windows Aero when this program or other programs performing similar actions are no longer running"

Obviously, I did a few Google searches before coming here personally and found someone with a similar problem: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2809106?start=0&tstart=0

A while down the page, someone mentioned the fix of switching "from DirectX to Safe Mode (GDI only)" in the QuickTime settings, and it seemed to work for everyone. Alas, to no avail. Although, it no longer blacks the screen or changes theme, the iTunes window still steals focus in the same time window.

I have not tried to uninstall and reinstall, as I really do not want to go through that again (and I'll be copying and pasting the database, xml and preference files back anyway).

I cannot convey how annoying this is, especially as it is my primary music player, and I listen to a lot of music.

iTunes Version: 10.4.1.10

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition - Quad-Core, 3.2GHz (OCed to 3.6)

RAM: 4GB DDR3

Graphics Card: Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum 1GB GDDR5

Windows 7

Posted on Sep 25, 2011 10:36 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 26, 2011 12:27 PM in response to Myth of Echelon

I've now discovered that it only happens once playing of any media commences. Nothing happens until you play something, but after that, no matter how many times you close and reopen iTunes, it will happen non-stop. Only by logging off and logging on, it will stop. That is, until you play something..

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

278,119 points

Sep 26, 2011 1:05 PM in response to Myth of Echelon

This probably has nothing to do with your problem but I've often been plagued in the past by iTunes bringing a dialog box to the foreground, when adding files for example, while I've been trying to get on with work elsewhere. I've just noticed a little control for this behavior in the scripting interface and have made a tiny script called ForceForeground to display the current value and change it if required.

tt2

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Answer 3

Jul 29, 2014 4:19 AM in response to Myth of Echelon

I had this same issue and I fixed it with Quicktime.
1- Open quicktime (install it if you don't already have)
2- Open quicktime's settings

3- Go to Advanced tab.

4- Under the 'video' category, select "Safe mode (GDI only)"
5- Close quicktime and restart your iTunes.

You'll notice that doing this WILL fix your iTunes problem. Why does it work? Because you're telling iTunes and Quicktime not to use your GPU to run their software, only use the motherboard card. If you did this to play a game, you'd feel a big performance drop, but since iTunes and Quicktime are not heavy for most computers today, you should be fine doing this and using your Aero theme.

Give me feedback
Hope I helped 😀

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Answer 4

Jul 29, 2014 4:29 AM in response to turingtest2

Nope, I saw it, but since I had JUST fixed my problem and this thread came up on google search for first result, I thought more people could have the same issue today. Perhaps it'll still help someone. It may not answer only the author of this old post, but other people that end up here from google like I did. =)

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