Does windhawk or the taskbar mod leave any remnants on the system, after using the installer via the Windows settings "Apps" page?

[ItsCubeTime]

Ive been having some weird issues lately, where (among other things) apps crash randomly, sometimes in cojunction with creating new windows (not entirely sure if its actually related to window creation, might also be linked to memory allocation). All issues start happening only once the system has been on for a couple of hours & then become gradually more frequent, which feels somewhat like some kind of a memory leak, however both Windows taskmanager & nvidia-smi both report low vram usage:

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.5472]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\olliv>nvidia-smi
Sat Jul  5 10:59:02 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 576.80                 Driver Version: 576.80         CUDA Version: 12.9     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                  Driver-Model | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB  WDDM  |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 49%   38C    P0             28W /  120W |    1074MiB /   6144MiB |      1%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A           10108    C+G   ...a\Roaming\Spotify\Spotify.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           10176    C+G   ...ram Files\KopiaUI\KopiaUI.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           13068    C+G   C:\Windows\explorer.exe               N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           15436    C+G   ..._cw5n1h2txyewy\SearchHost.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           15460    C+G   ...y\StartMenuExperienceHost.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           17392    C+G   ...s\PowerToys.PowerLauncher.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           18556    C+G   ...8bbwe\Microsoft.CmdPal.UI.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           19336    C+G   ...5n1h2txyewy\TextInputHost.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           19628    C+G   ...xyewy\ShellExperienceHost.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           20932    C+G   ...UI3Apps\PowerToys.Peek.UI.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           22668    C+G   ...yb3d8bbwe\WindowsTerminal.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           24744    C+G   ...sTray\SamsungNotesSysTray.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           24800    C+G   ...yb3d8bbwe\Notepad\Notepad.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           25008    C+G   ...8bbwe\PhoneExperienceHost.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           30792    C+G   ....0.3296.93\msedgewebview2.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           31900    C+G   ...3d8bbwe\YourPhoneAppProxy.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A           82744    C+G   ...cord\app-1.0.9197\Discord.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A          188552    C+G   ...ms\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A          210972    C+G   ...ef.win7x64\steamwebhelper.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A          230684    C+G   ...2p2nqsd0c76g0\app\ChatGPT.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A          315516    C+G   ...ntrolPanel\SystemSettings.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A          399648    C+G   ...0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\Time.exe      N/A      |
|    0   N/A  N/A          400348    C+G   ...__8wekyb3d8bbwe\onenoteim.exe      N/A      |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

When it comes to regular ram, task manager & resource monitor also looks quite healthy (and even if my ram was full, which its not, I should still have additional working memory via the system pagefile):

Occasionally, all windows on my system will also go entirely black for about 2 seconds, for 1 or 2 frames I will also see Windows 7 style window styling appear on the screen & then all windows gets restored (my rather uneducated guess here is that something related to my GPU or window manager is resetting or crashing, then firing back up successfully). Usually I will have seen some individual app crash once or twice before this happens.

At around the same time, some newly opened editors will also have glitched window frames, which can look something like this (this is the group policy editor, its not supposed to have a transparent titlebar, you may have noticed I had the same issue with the resource monitor window when I took that screenshot):

Roughly at the same time as these issues started I tried installing (& then uninstalling) windhawk with the taskbar mod (with the preset that removes the empty gray space at the sides) -however I cannot say conclusively that these issues are caused by something done by windhawk at all - and I do not know how to debug this as no apps Im familiar with report heavy memory usage. Hence the question: do windhawk leave any remnants after uninstalling that could potentially cause issues on some systems (eg system binary mods/additions, reg edits)?

Another issue is that certain windows (so far I think Ive only seen this with chrome powered tech, like spotify/opera/vs code etc) will sort of "refresh" randomly. As in, they freeze for like 2 seconds and then they reload everything graphical on the page (sort of like ctrl r in a webbrowser, except text that I may have typed on the page is still there (so no loss of state) & afaik no new request is sent to the "backend").

Any thoughts/advice/pointers would be greatly appreciated. Would rather like to avoid a full system reinstall as I use my system for development and therefore have a somewhat complex setup that would take a bit of time to reconfigure. Thanks for reading 💝

[ItsCubeTime]

I believe I also tried this mod: https://windhawk.net/mods/disable-rounded-corners however as it only installs a very simple runtime hook I dont see how it could cause any issues like Im having, especially after uninstalling 😅

[ItsCubeTime]

Another behavior is that, once these issues start appearing, closing down a couple of apps will usually stop more glitches from happening (again, making it seem much like a memory leak). However, as task manager/resource monitor/nvidia-smi says I have plenty of free ram & vram Im not really sure how this helps find the cause of these issues (I also see no programs with unusual memory usage for that matter, all programs look very much the same in consumption as they did before issues started) :V

[ItsCubeTime]

may also be worth pointing out that I have wsl installed since several years ago. But since windhawk is now uninstalled I feel like that shouldnt be an issue 😅

[silverbacknet]

The symptoms you're describing don't sound at all like the symptoms of a runaway memory leak -- the main symptom of that if that your hard drive space starts being eaten up and Windows keeps allocating more virtual memory, then it all gets freed up if you restart. Chrome and other browsers are by far the worst culprits of that. The black windows can sometimes indicate a handle leak, but that's also usually big greedy applications' fault, and unlikely if they're aero windows.

Your symptoms sound like your system is overheating or you have bad RAM. Please download https://github.com/LibreHardwareMonitor/LibreHardwareMonitor and check the temps of your CPU and GPU, they should ideally be under 70C during heavy load, though most are pretty stable up to 80C. And if it's idle and they're high, then you have a recipe for random crashes galore, and it's no surprise their start would coincide with summer. If that looks good, try putting MemTest86 on a USB and letting it run overnight.

Hopefully it's just dust buildup, and you can just take your system outside and blow some canned air around it. If it's that a component has actually degraded with age and running hot, you might have to isolate and replace it.

[ItsCubeTime]

Thank you @silverbacknet . Now that I think about it, I actually undervolted the CPU some 1 or 2 years ago. I may have a go at removing that offset (I noticed that undervolting too much results in crashes during prolonged max CPU load, but maybe too little voltage could also cause other issues, like what Im seeing rn?).

My room temp is between 22-26C all year around, but this is the CPU at max load (could sit at 100C before I undervolted it at which point it would throttle to avoid higher temps):

GPU:

I'm a little skittish about opening up the chassis unless I need to replace something :-P So I think I will wait cleaning it, however my GPU has no backplate so its a bit dusty on the back.

[ItsCubeTime]

Maybe I should try updating the system bios & chipset drivers? I think I'm still using whatever shipped with the hardware (except for GPU drivers, which are up to date).
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-z690-p-wifi-d4/helpdesk_bios?model2Name=PRIME-Z690-P-WIFI-D4
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-z690-p-wifi-d4/helpdesk_download?model2Name=PRIME-Z690-P-WIFI-D4

[m417z]

Does windhawk or the taskbar mod leave any remnants on the system

The answer to your title question is no. There are specific mods which are designed to modify the system in some way (example), and some cases where accidental modifications happen (example), but in the vast majority of cases, mods make only temporary changes in memory, e.g. by placing hooks and running code as part of another program.