Cave Markings 

Tonight we held our VS2005 & SQL Server 2005 local launch event.  Microsoft provided some copies of the software to raffle off to the user group members, and Jason Bentley and I presented some features from the new products.

Jason showed some awesome new failover capabilities in SQL Server 2005, and I did a presentation on the new Windows Forms controls and deployment features under the heading of “Smart Client”, whatever that means.

We had a good turnout, and everyone seemed interested in the topics being presented.  I had a few gaffes in my presentation, but nothing I haven’t seen the professionals do.

The next meeting is two weeks from tonight, and I expect to see a good turnout then as well.  It looks like The East Tennessee .NET User’s Group is healthy and growing in 2006!

I spend my days looking at high resolution monitors; 1600x1200 at work and 1920x1200 at home.   One suggestion I read for using high resolutions, is to bump up the DPI Setting in display properties from 96 to 120dpi.  This seemed like a good idea until I tried it.

All the title bars become too large and some applications can't cope with non-standard dpi settings.  I see enough bad formatting on the web. I don't need it on my desktop too, so I changed the setting back.  Unfortunately the window captions were still the wrong size.  I fixed this by going to Display Properties -> Appearance -> Advanced and playing with the title bar settings until things appeared normal.

This would seem to end this chapter in my battle with Windows(tm) except that I earn my living using two Integrated Development Environments: Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio.  Both IDEs make use of sub-windows with half-height captions.  After my DPI Setting experiment, these captions were twice as tall as they should be with complementary giant, blocky icons. :-P

I have put up with this situation for months, until today.  Today I found my limit in tolerating ugly displays and set about correcting the issue.  Unfortuanately, Google did not provide me any leads.  I find it unlikely that nobody else has had this problem.  Given my state of mind, I perceviered.

I set  about searching the registry for vaious keywords.  I eventually found the WindowMetrics key under Users\.Default.  I exported that key, edited the path, and imported it into the equivalent key in the CurrentUser node.  After a quick logoff/logon to reload the registry, Bob's your uncle!

The attached file should serve to correct this situation for any other users with this affliciton.  Change the extention from .reg.txt to .reg, double-click, select OK, and you'll be golden.

++Alan

WindowMetrics.reg.txt (4.4 KB)