Jorge, further to my pm...

Nexus started working with the magnify effect after a couple of reboots.

But now the problem is back... sort of...

When I mouseover the unhidden dock (and it happens even if the dock isn't hidden), with magnify effect on (and no other effects at all), while the magnification is still zooming, the dock background looks fine.

But when the zoom is "finished" (i.e. I'm hovering the mouse over the icon I want to launch), the dock background either disappears (transparent) or it turns white. The icons always appear OK, just the background disappears.

I have NOT turned on any transparency for the dock or for workshelf.

Whoops - I just hit the UAE error when trying to open NS prefs to double-check that I haven't turned any transparency on in NS also by mistake. Oh well.

Just remembered: are you running Logitech's Setpoint by any chance? Thornsten once warned it causes problems similar to those (windows turning white).

As for the UAE error: exactly how did you try to open NS Prefs?

AHA! That's exactly what happened. My wonderful trackball mouse lost it's "marbles" last week, and I bought a cheap and very nasty Logitech trackball thingy to replace it temporarily.

The problems I saw with Winstep were just coincidental. How strange is it that I would install and use a tested application the same day I changed my mouse driver? And started having firewall problems?

I don't actually have setpoint active any more (I loathe those stupid tinkly bitmapped pseudo-applications, no offence intended to Winstep !! ), so maybe it's the logitech driver itself that's at fault?

I'm using XMouse to add functionality, I'll disable that and try uninstalling the logitech driver and using the microsoft generic driver (the Logitech driver adds absolutely nothing to the use of the thing - with one ball and only two buttons, it's not like it's a Dvorak keyboard ) and get back to you... I'm in the middle of a big system cleanup, so I'll post back when I get a chance to play.

But that's a good catch, even if it's not directly related.

Buggy Logitech software was always a huge source of problems, especially for me (somewhere in this forum there's a story about Logitech's $"!"$! Camcpl control panel applet which managed to crash anything trying to enumerate the Control Panel - of course, what the user would see is YOUR application crashing, unaware that the true culprit was buggy Logitech software).

Setpoint, for instance, hooks into each and every process in your system. If a process hangs (as it happens so frequently with Outlook when it's checking for mail on an IMAP account), so does Setpoint - and all your nice special key/buttons features stop working until the process resumes or you kill it.

Unfortunately I have no idea what Setpoint is doing that it causes layered windows to become blank - whatever it is, it has no business hooking into your system in such a way that it causes problems for 3rd party applications.

You were right : removing setpoint removed the problems!

Interestingly, setpoint itself didn't appear anywhere in the process list (I use SysInternals Process explorer x64), but the layered dock surfaces still disappeared! When I removed SetPoint from the add/remove programs (and rebooted - WTF? Why the hell should I reboot to remove a GDMFSOB mouse driver? Ah, the hooking problem!) - the problem instantly disappeared.

I had the exact same type of problem with the Microsoft "IntelliPoint" drivers I was using ("MoroniPoint" would be a more accurate description of Microsoft's mouse and keyboard software). I should say the same "class" of problem, the physical manifestation was a bit different.

Then, I got bizarre screen repaint problems, where a "hidden" application would suddenly paint parts of itself over the top of the currently focused window with no warning. Mind you, that was mostly related to Adobe applications, which are probably the least well-developed and most poorly debugged commercial software available on Windows today. But still, it was really annoying - and more so because it all was caused by the Microsoft mouse software! What possible combination of mouse movements could concievably cause unused and unfocused window instances to be sent repaint messages by the mouse software? Their workaround was typical Microsoft : use different applications so the same problems don't occur.

<SOAPBOX>It's no wonder developers and users get frustrated, when the leading commercial developers design and build software with such serious and astonishingly untested bugs and coding errors, and mind-bogglingly stupid assumptions.

Hmm. Sorry about that.</SOAPBOX>

On a related note, it seems that the problem with NextStart's prefs dialog triggering (not "causing"! ) UAEs has also been fixed by removing the setpoint software. At least, the last 5 prefs accesses have worked fine.

Isn't it interesting that for both developers (MS and Logitech) their software not only doesn't add anything useful (I've discovered that I get finer pointer control AND better accelleration using X-Mouse than any of the Logitech application settings, and the same was true for the MS apps), but they cause serious and easily avoided side-effects. But like Adobe, neither MS nor Logitech are capable of listening to (or acting on) any customer feedback that doesn't involve legal threats. If anyone's interested in ranting, have a look on the Adobe community forums for a post I made recently with "Dear Adobe" as the title... And feel free to add comments to that if you're able to.

Again, thanks for your excellent support, Jorge. I apologise on Logitech's behalf to have taken so much of your time!

FWIW, I haven't had a single multimedia enhancement fail in W7 and Winstep. All the magnifications are magnificent, the enhancements are excellent, and the reflections are mirror-like.
So poor old XP must be blamed for much of the problem.