PuTTY semi-bug win-redraw

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summary: Window redraw problems on Windows (white areas)
class: semi-bug: This might or might not be a bug, depending on your precise definition of what a bug is.
difficulty: taxing: Needs external things we don't have (standards, users etc)
priority: historic: This is an old bug report that we think is either fixed without noticing, or confined to old systems, or too vague.
present-in: 0.56 2005-01-13 0.58

We get occasional reports of failure to redraw parts of the PuTTY terminal window, typically when another window is opaquely dragged over the PuTTY window, leaving white areas on the window which can usually be filled in by dragging another window over the PuTTY window again. Two of us have managed to reproduce this ourselves with vigorous window-waving.

Currently this looks like a Windows bug. We (JTN and OSD) can reproduce it with apps other than PuTTY (for instance, in WordPad's menu bar). We're assured that this probably isn't a function of the video card driver (which isn't responsible for calculating what to redraw, just for doing what it's told), but it may be a function of the Windows version (all reports so far are on NT-series OSs, and my (JTN) attempts to reproduce on 98SE didn't show anything).

(I (JTN) have a vague recollection about some misgivings and our return value from window/dialog functions, or similar, compared to the docs on MSDN, although this was years ago. I wonder if that could be causing this?)

Reports:

0.56, WinXP SP2, nVidia card
8E5ACAE05E6B9E44A2903C693A5D4E8A04C48633@hqemmail02.nvidia.com
0.56?, WinXP pre-SP2, Matrox Millennium G550 (OSD)
831xebsg1z.fsf@chiark.greenend.org.uk
2005-01-13, Win2K SP4, ATI RAGE 128 PRO II (JTN), 1.4GHz
Quite reproducible. Unable to get Notepad to exhibit the same behaviour on similar timescales, so it seems PuTTY-specific.
(I can also trigger partial redraw failures on the configuration dialog by the same method! -- the background becomes green, bizarrely. Also 0.56.)
Can also reproduce with WordPad menu bar, so probably not our problem.
20050117101008.GI7859@chiark.greenend.org.uk
0.58 and previous; various video cards, XP Pro / 2000 Pro, many machines
Correlated with "East Asian Languages" in Region Options
20050319141100.GA68401@parodius.com et al

SGT, 2024-11-17: classifying this bug as historic. It was last documented here with WinXP, and I can't remember any recent re-reports.

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Audit trail for this semi-bug.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2024-11-17 14:53:03 +0000)