I installed SF on one of my machines and went to work on the tutorials. I notices, when using the Mapper, that the title areas of the forms were not displaying properly. The top of the mapper was gray. As the other forms popped up portions of them did not paint.



Then I went to the next step in the tutorial and added the customerMaintenance form. What I got is in cm2.jpg.



I then installed SF on another machine and got cm1.jpg which looks normal.



Both machines are generic XP pro. In fact, the one with the problem display is nore generic that the one that works. My recollection is that you are doing some custom rendering of these areas (remember that last year my 132 dpi screen was not rendering correctly in these regions of the form).



The system with the working display is set at 120 dpi. The one with the problem is plain vanilla - set at 96 dpi.



I was trying to arrange it so that the machine with the problem would be my primary SF development system (not realizing that there might be a problem).



Any suggestions about how to diagnose this would be appreciated

I think it's a problem with the SystemColors... It looks one of the colors that we are referencing is not available through the theme that you're running. 

Could you post a screenshot of the Appearance tab of the Display Properties for your computer so we can see what "theme" you have running?

Thanks.

Here is the screenshot

If you manually supply a PrimaryGradient and Secondary gradient on the GradientFormheader control do the problem ever happen?  If not, then it has to be your machine.  Since this is probably one of the most common controls used, and we too use it everywhere, I do not think there is an issue with the control.  So I would try manually setting the Primary and Secondary gradient colors to see if the problem goes away.  That would at least give you a clue.

I tried setting the gradient, setting an image, changing the captions, etc. Nothing seems to force that area to repaint. It just grabs and retains a chunk of whatever window happens to draw in front of it.



Like you say, it must be the machine. I just hope that none of the machines that I deploy to have this behavior.



Thanks

Well, we have deployed to thousands of machines and not had an issue....but if you are setting up machines just like your development machine then I would assume that you will have an issue.

Try dropping on a DefaultApplicationTheme control and setting the Theme to BlueSKies or BlackIce and see if the header is re-drawn.  This will hard code the colors and not look at Windows colors.  See if the problem persists.

As you probably guessed I have a reputation as the person to who all the things that "never happened before" happen to. I don't want to belabor the point because I can work around it (although I was hoping to make this particular machine my primary SF development box).



Just so you don't think that I'm nuts I have attached a video that demonstrates 2 of your apps off the start menu exhibiting the problem. I have not found any other app on this box that exhibits such behavior - so while it's probably the box, my guess is that something about the way you're handling owner drawn areas may be contributing.

btw - adding a DefaultApplicationTheme control and setting the Theme to BlueSKies had no effect