Photo Gallery's fine tuning crashes Nvidia's graphics drivers


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If you plan to use the fine tuning controls in Windows Live Photo Gallery in Windows 8, with a Nvidia graphics card, be careful - doing so may cause a driver crash. On my system, the desktop does not redraw correctly and I'm stuck at a black screen. Workaround in that case is to RDP into the affected computer and hope the desktop shows up there (try closing and opening a few RDP sessions, and hitting Start).

There's an existing thread on this issue: http://answers.micro...m=1349584437958

If you look up the driver crash caused by Photo Gallery in Reliability Monitor, it does show that Microsoft is aware of this issue.

Further testing reveals that it appears to be the Shadows slider causing the crash. No crashes occurred with Brightness and Contrast.

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I'm experiencing a somewhat related issue. I have an Nvidia GeForce 550 Ti and I get the whole desktop crashing and black screen if I happen to rapidly move a photo preview window from one monitor to another in a multi-monitor setup. This is using Windows Photo Gallery 2012. I don't know if the issue occurs every time I move the window back and forth, but I have noticed that it occurs with just Photo Gallery, and many other windows I throw over to one monitor or the other work just fine.

I must have been patient one day because I did actually wait long enough for the driver and the desktop to recover. It took about 3 or 4 minutes, but everything did come back OK. Previously I couldn't even get Task Manager to open. Thanks for the RDP tip - I'll try this next time it happens.

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  • 6 months later...

Just an update: it seems this is finally fixed. No crash on a GTX 670 with the 314.22 driver set.

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