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LifestreamI believe this could have been a problem as far back as Vista, but since I just jumped on the bandwagon I was simply taken aback by this complete foul-up. The problem is simply as follows: Older and 3rd party applications have their dialog boxes and interface garbled by what appears to be a font size problem. Text becomes too long, wordwraps, gets hidden, sometimes making part of the ui invisible.
Illustration:
(from left to right: Radeon Bios Editor, Transfer Time Calculator, Nimtoy, XYplorer, Acdsee Classic)
Ultimately I am sure this could be blamed on developers not keeping up with the times. But whatever Microsoft did under the hood I want it undone and bloody fast at that. Could it have something to do with DPI aware? Or is it a font replacement (“FontSubstitutes”) in the registry? I have set my system font size back to 100% (96 DPI) from 125% (120 DPI) or whatever it was out of the box but beyond that I am at a loss.
Addendum: Indeed, moving back to 120 DPI “solved” the issue. But I can’t run W7 kiddie style obviously. Icons become blurry as hell for most applications, and things get so large on my preferred 1280×960 screen that nothing will fit anymore. Quite a dilemma. But it must be some sort of a bug. Some sort of font size or dialog box element anomaly.
Solution: After much google-fu I came upon a discussion that pointed to this. Turns out that because my installation started out at 120 DPI, certain (bitmap) font settings in the registry where locked to correspond to that DPI setting. Switching back to 100% will shrink the interface but keep the font size, thus breaking the layout. There is a registry fix at the above link that will reset bitmap font sizes back to what they ought to be at 96 DPI. Or vice versa if you for some reason have the opposite problem. All in all another example of how LCD users and Microsoft surveys are ruining things.
