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[PTRun] System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: {Desktop composition is disabled} #31226

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@AlexDeMoura

Description

Microsoft PowerToys version

0.78.0.0

Installation method

PowerToys auto-update

Running as admin

Yes

Area(s) with issue?

General

Steps to reproduce

When I was choosing a font in the font menu of Excel, the screen went dark for one second or something, and it came back showing this window: Power Toys Run ran into an issue. Something went wrong. The attached log contents:
2024-02-01.txt
The following software was running under an updated Windows 10 (8 MB RAM, 18 GB fixed VM, GPU0 Intel HD 530, GPU1 NVidia not active):

  1. One File Explorer window in the folder containing the Excel file I was working on;
  2. One Opera One (version: 105.0.4970.34) densely tabbed window, with Update stream: Stable, under System: Windows 10 64-bit (WoW64), and Chromium version:119.0.6045.199 - Browser identification: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 OPR/105.0.0.0 - Installation type:
    Stand-alone installation (USB), but the opera is installed in a C: folder (I love portable stuff, you know - portable means freedom);
  3. One Microsoft Excel for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2402 Build 16.0.17318.20000) 64-bit running a single <70 KB file in a C: folder;
  4. Background software running in Taskbar: PowerToys 0.78.0.0 (updated yesterday) and five more apps. OneDrive, Webroot anti-virus, f.lux v4.131 (screen brightness management), and two Lenovo hardware monitors (bundled software);
  5. Plus, a lot of stuff in Task Manager that I don't care and it is too much to post here, but it includes at least a bunch of Adobe processes and a half dozen MS Edge processes, even if the Acrobat, Photoshop, and Edge browser are not in use. By the way, MS Edge is the default browser - but I am not a great fan. I like Opera Portable better.

The fonts menu in Excel contains many Asian fonts, mainly Hebraic versions of the most common MS Office fonts. I was choosing one of them (Arial, Calibri, or Roboto) for a single cell.
The screen background contains a static picture (no Slideshow) from the Pinnula Dynamic Theme (background management, last version) installed from the Microsoft Store.

✔️ Expected Behavior

Such things shouldn't be happening. It gives me the creeps and sometimes a heart attack. But I like the PowerToys so much, I don't want to uninstall it. The ones I use the most are (in this order):

  1. Text Extractor: a lot, but with limited capability of Microsoft OCR Packs (please give me my Tesseract) - ORP files, two installed: English and Portuguese - both are just... fair;
  2. PowerRename: powerful, despite I hate REGEX with all my guts - I do NOT care what Chomsky said about it - I consider this "language" as LASHEMO (LAzy SHorthand for English MOnoglots). Down with ASCII and its keyboards - welcome UNICODE! Long live the REPUBLICA and the Excel functions, the world's only translatable computer language, but the MS ORPs can't recognize those functions as a text to be OCRed - go figure. I would use an 'extended' MS-DOS BATCH language mixed with some old BASIC string functions and maybe some well-known Excel string functions, but that is me. No need to change - but some numbering (01, 02, ...) or alphabetic itemization (a., b., ...) without using REGEX I think it is necessary;
  3. Color Picker: nice - a loveable one. It needs a few more features to become perfect, such as optional picker areas larger than a single pixel - I suggest 8-around-1 and 16-around-9 - and a few more standard color libraries such as Munsell for painting, the European/German RAL mainly used in varnish, powder coating, and plastics, and the IEC 60062:2016 RKM code for electronic components. The world was not made for software developers only, you know.
  4. Shortcut Guide: it is OK, but why is it limited to [WIN] key's functions only on a single screen? Why combinations aren't available while the Shortcut Guide is ON the screen? Such as, after the Shortcut Guide shows, press [SHIFT] and all [SHIFT]+[WIN] functions appear, press [ALT] and all [ALT]+[WIN] functions show up, press [CTRL] and we have all [CTRL]+[WIN] functions on the screen, and so on - but the thing vanishes with any key pressed or any mouse click.

Is there any Browser Selector (by link, domain, or user's choice) in your roadmap? Or is it against THE company's policy?

Am I asking too much? I appreciate your work, but you guys opened Pandora's box - it was full of users' wishes.

❌ Actual Behavior

Thank God the computer didn't freeze this time, but it already happened once this year. I didn't lose the work - I continued to work on the Excel spreadsheet. No other app was closed - however, I had to restart Excel since its visual elements and components, such as buttons, menus, bars, and a few others, went black or empty (with their background color only).

Thanks for your excellent work, and best regards.

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    Issue-BugSomething isn't workingNeeds-ReproWe can't figure out how to make this happen. Please help find a simplified repro.Priority-0Bugs that we consider release-blocking/recall-class (P0)Product-PowerToys RunImproved app launch PT Run (Win+R) Window

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