[SOLVED] Unwanted Wake from Sleep on Vista

By Fungi008:

Vista's dumb multimedia sharing option: More complex (and I don't think anyone else has posted it). Do this:
Control Panel -> Power Options -> If "High Performance" is selected, choose something else, like "Balanced" (I don't know why this works) -> Change plan settings (for the chosen power plan) -> Change advanced power settings -> Scroll down to Multimedia settings -> Choose "Allow the computer to sleep"

Thanks, Fungi008!

[SOLVED] Dialog Boxes Stuck Behind Their Parent Windows

I thought this was a common Windows bug, but since the search terms were so common, it was very difficult to find a discussion on the matter online. I had a frequent problem where an application would bring up a modal dialog that would get very easily trapped behind the parent window. That is, a dialog box would have focus that could not be shifted to the window that spawned it, but the dialog box itself would not come to the forefront so it would be obscured. Trying to switch using the taskbar or alt-tab didn't usually help. Regrettably, I thought the problem was due to bad programming of the applications that demonstrated the behavior, like Iolo System Mechanic 8. It turns out the problem was instead due to a software conflict...

Quitting Acer GridVista and stopping it from running at startup fixed the problem. Similar stay-on-top shell enhancements might interfere also.

Possible Fix for DWM.EXE error?

During shutdown on Vista, I would occasionally get the following error:

GDI+ Window: dwm.exe - Application Error : The instruction at 0x748573f6 referenced memory at 0x748573f6. The memory could not be written.

I was also having problems with a blank taskbar and notification area upon resume from sleep mode.

I believe that this could be related to changing the driver for nVidia graphics or changing disk access to AHCI causing the Desktop Window Manager to no longer be seen as genuine.

Here are the commands that (I hope) has fixed the issue:

cd %windir%\system32
wscript slmgr.vbs -rearm

Then, reboot when prompted.

UPDATE (29 July 2008): That wasn't enough. Try the following if you're still having trouble:

1. Reinstall the license files with wscript slmgr.vbs -rilc (wait for confirmation)
   
2. Reboot
3. Go to Genuine Microsoft Software and click Validate Windows