Disappearing Process Screens

[jwaters125]

Several times over the last 2 weeks I have had process screens disappear and reappear.  Most recently the ImageIntegration screen disappeared after I tried to minimize the Pixel Rejection section.  It reappeared after I clicked on the PI screen.  I can not reproduce these problems.  Sometimes the process screens disappear when PI is running another process.

I am running the current release of PI with all patches installed.  I am running on a Win 7 Pro x64 with all current patches and Service Packs installed.  I know Win 7 is not supported but I have never had these problems before the last PI update.

[Juan Conejero]

These problems cannot be reproduced on any supported platform under normal working conditions. This is a machine-specific issue.

Most likely this is being caused by a faulty graphics driver, probably a defective OpenGL implementation. Unfortunately, many graphics drivers are no longer being updated on Windows 7, given that this version of Windows is approaching its end of support lifecycle date on January 2020. The new version 1.8.6 of PixInsight is more demanding of a valid working environment than previous versions, including the need for a working, valid OpenGL implementation.

You can try disabling OpenGL by running PixInsight from a command line as follows:

C:\Program Files\PixInsight\bin\PixInsight.exe --opengl=raster

Let me know if this solves these problems.

[jwaters125]

Not sure I agree with you.  Old releases of PI have been running on the same platform for 18 plus months without any issues.  The drivers are up to date and none of the other OpenGL dependent apps have issues.

I have run Intel Video Driver Compatibility tests on my platform and no errors were reported. I have asked some software developers at Intel and they say my HW and drivers are up to date and I shouldn't have any issues.

I will run OpenGL functionality / stress benchmarks later this week and get back to you.

Sr. Systems Engineer / Architect Intel Corp. (Retired)